


Animal Husbandry

by heartofthesunrise



Series: Animal Husbandry [2]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Zayn One Direction, hiatus blues, ot5 vibes, zayn's farm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-15 01:04:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19284922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: "Don't do that," Zayn says."What?""That Harry thing, that, like - I'm not ringing you begging you to come round. I'm telling you, if you want to do this thing you said you'd like to do, where you come to stay - something that wasyour idea,mind - these are the dates, and it's up to you."





	Animal Husbandry

**Author's Note:**

> Big ups to rarepairfest for making me commit to finishing this, to Alex & co in our camp nano cabin for keeping me honest, and to Angela who babied me when I sent her a rougher, more unpleasant version of this fic and gave me the incisive, insightful feedback I needed to fix some big errors. Any that remain are mine.

I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap. Probably not even real. 

Mark Z. Danielewski, _House of Leaves_ (2000)

-

Zayn has the farm to himself for the rest of the summer and most of the fall. 

He'd told Harry as much in a text, which Harry'd read after he'd gotten offstage in Chicago, trying to shake the rest of the glitter out of his hair with little success. 

It's just something they're trying, this whole speaking to each other again thing. Harry's trying very hard to retain an open heart and low expectations. It's not every day or even every week, it's mostly texting, and at any given time it feels like an exercise in futility or the most important attempt at personal growth he's ever done. 

Which is really par for the course with anything to do with Zayn, feels like. It's just opposites and contradictions, always has been. 

Harry calls him from his hotel late that night. He knows they're at the precipice of something, some breakthrough. This tentative olive branch is something he's been waiting for, some token of evidence of the work they've been putting into one another. If Zayn asks him to come stay, or if he can breathe through inviting himself back to the farm, or... It just seems like if they clear this hurdle maybe everything else will be the healing and repairing of their friendship, the stuff Harry thought they'd have gotten to already, none of this back and forth. 

"It's after midnight," Zayn says when he answers. "I'm asleep." 

"Could google my schedule," Harry replies. "Could know what nights you should be, like, strategically texting me when I'll have time to talk." 

"I didn't think you'd _call_ me, like," Zayn says. His voice is deep and muffled, like he's speaking half into a pillow. 

"Yeah, yeah..." 

There's quiet between them, just the fuzz of the phone connection and Zayn's heavy, sleepy breaths on the other end of it. 

"So..." Harry says. 

"I mean, are you coming out here, or not?" Zayn yawns partway through the sentence so the words sound taffy-pulled and silly, like they're not potentially life-changing, like this conversation isn't the culmination of a year's worth of conversations. Like they're not weighing the last year against the ones before it, deciding if it's all been a waste of time.

"Are you asking me to?" Harry asks, because he's a shit, and he won't meet anybody in the middle if he has the option of making them come further towards him. 

"Don't do that," Zayn says. 

"What?"

"That Harry thing, that, like - I'm not ringing you begging you to come round. I'm telling you, if you want to do this thing you said you'd like to do, where you come to stay - something that was _your idea,_ mind - these are the dates, and it's up to you." 

"Oh," Harry says, cowed. "Let me check my planner, I'll text you in the morning." 

"Could've texted me in the morning anyway, saved me the trouble." 

"Well, yes, but..." Harry can feel Zayn going back to sleep four hundred miles away. "That would've been inauthentic." 

"Goodnight." 

"Goodnight." 

Harry hangs up and dims the bedside lamp and lays in bed scrolling through his various work and personal calendars, trying to move things, clear some time. It all gets easier after tour's over, of course - he's got some wrap-up stuff beginning of August and then he's not booked anything, not even a lunch date, til end of November when he expects he'll be ready to start writing again. 

It's actually lining up pretty easily, all things considered, with the dates Zayn's sent along. 

He texts Zayn a couple of potential arrival and departure dates to look at in the morning and is just falling asleep himself when his phone lights up on the table with a text. 

_Go to sleep Harry. See you on the thirteenth_

-

Harry's still adjusting to the strange hours Zayn keeps. As much time as they've spent apart, he still expects time to himself in the mornings, to not see Zayn until past noon, groggy and rumpled and looking for breakfast. 

The first day he wakes up in the guest room he goes downstairs for tea and finds everything laid out for him already beside a half-full coffee pot. There's a note in Zayn's odd, looping handwriting tucked half under the bottom of a mug: 

_Help yourself :)_  
_Z_

So he does, bustling around the little kitchen with its exposed brick and roof beams, its marvelous view of the little garden plots Zayn has going out back. He takes his tea out to the front porch and watches the wind ripple the fields, stir up a little whirlwind of loose soil further down the drive. He's no clue where Zayn's gone off to, but he doesn't feel at ease enough to go hunting for him. He'd find his way into a tall cornfield and get lost in it and never make it back out again. 

And as much as they'd agreed to do this together, to give repairing their friendship one last honest shot, it's not like Harry's exactly comfortable with Zayn. 

If he thinks too much about how it'd been after Zayn left, Harry starts to feel sweaty and guilty and angry and awful. He remembers Louis breaking down, sending Zayn so many frantic texts that they'd had to take his phone away from him; remembers how Liam had spent the rest of that tour quiet and serious, studying Zayn's harmonies with his expressive eyebrows drawn together and a half-glass of whiskey close at hand; remembers how abruptly Niall had stopped arguing against a hiatus, how defeated he'd been. 

Harry hadn't texted Zayn, or called him. Anger had blazed quickly and completely through him, like an arsonist had wanted to hollow him out as efficiently as possible. It was so bright and so hot that he couldn't make himself look at it, and when it had gone the logical thing seemed to be not to care at all. 

He makes another cup of tea in the kitchen and heads out back, because he might not be able to traverse the acres of farmland by himself yet, but he can say hello to the hens in their coop, certainly. They're easier to talk to than Zayn is. 

"Ladies," he greets them, squatting down in front of the wire perimeter of their enclosure. He hasn't seen them all out of the coop at once yet, he doesn't think - there are at least five or six of them, but there might be more, all of them bustling around and pecking in the dirt and shaking their strange, reptilian heads at him. "Beautiful morning." 

Two of the hens squabble over a bit of something in the dirt that looks a little like an old piece of bread, but might be straw, or a bit of a plastic bag, or something. 

"That's not very polite," he tells them. They thoroughly ignore him. 

After a moment Harry sits all the way down in the dirt. He's done a lot of shopping in preparation for his sojourn here, and he has jeans that fit and t-shirts he doesn't have to dry-clean and a couple of jackets and a pair of sturdy boots he's still trying to break in. He's got a pair of battered Converse he'd pinched off Zayn the last time they'd seen each other. There's a cedar chest of drawers in the guest room and Harry'd unpacked everything into it yesterday; the grey t-shirt he's got on already smells old and earthy, transformed by Zayn's house. 

"They're better for conversation earlier in the morning," Zayn says from behind Harry.

Harry jumps a little in surprise, stirring up a cloud of dust, and twists around to look at him. 

Zayn is standing beside a beautiful horse. 

"Zayn," Harry says, stupidly. 

"Harry."

"That's a horse." 

"It's a farm." 

"Right." 

The horse is some sort of dapple-nosed dove grey type, its coat shiny and its large, dark eyes paying Harry no mind. It has long, thick eyelashes. Its ears flick independently of one another, one forward and one to the side. Harry wonders what it's listening to. 

"You match," he says, pointing. 

"What?" Zayn asks. 

"You must use the same brand of mascara." 

It makes Zayn laugh, and swing his arm gently around the back of the horse's neck, like you would with a mate at a bar. 

"What's its name?" Harry asks. 

"Cool," Zayn says, as though that's a normal thing someone would name an animal and not something made-up and stupid. 

Harry waits for the punch line. 

"Wait, seriously?" 

Zayn shrugs in a _don't blame me_ type of way, even though there's no way it's not entirely his fault. 

"Me and Gi were picking 'im out, and there were all these horses there but we kept looking at him, like, _that's a cool horse,_ and it just stuck, like." He strokes the horse's mane with a gentle palm. "It's stupid but it's too late to change it. Honestly I thought you'd have seen, Gigi's always putting pictures up." 

Harry doesn't know how to say he's got Zayn's on-again off-again girlfriend blocked on every type of social media he ever checks, which isn't many of them, because he can't think of a way to phrase it that doesn't come across jealous and insane. It's not that he resents Zayn having relationships - it's good that he does, he seems happier, when he's got somebody he's coming home to. It's just... Somewhere in the beginning Zayn being with Gigi got tied up in Harry's mind with Zayn leaving, with Zayn hating him, hating them, hating the music Harry'd written for them, and it was like... Anyway, it'd be weird to unblock her now. 

"Not on the gram much," he says instead, and Zayn shrugs. 

"Me neither." 

"Cool." 

Zayn points at the horse. "No, he's Cool." 

They spend the morning touring the farm. Harry walks on Zayn's other side to put Cool out in a big, fenced-in pasture, and from there they hike out to the edge of Zayn's land and then back inwards, Zayn pointing out places he'd like to put crops, build an enclosure to raise a whole flock of sheep, get the place really functioning. 

"Not for profit, like, just for... I don't know, just to always be doing something, you know?" 

_It doesn't leave much time for music,_ Harry thinks but doesn't say. He knows Zayn's had a handful of singles out this year. They haven't talked about it. 

They make their way around the back of the house to the garden, a scatterplot of raised beds where there are strawberries ripening on the vine, tomato plants tethered to stakes, pots of herbs and flowers and planters bursting with kale and wispy carrot stems and everything. Zayn talks about growing apple trees, further out towards the tree line. Just beyond the edges of the last manicured pasture, the trees drip with kudzu. 

"It's a fuckin' nightmare to keep in check," Zayn says seriously. "I'll have to get more goats, like, take 'em out there to bite it back." 

Harry can't help but be amused by this Zayn, because he still looks and sounds the way he does, and he's talking about herding goats in rural America and hand-raising an apple orchard for something to do. He wants to shake Zayn by the shoulders and ask him if he's ever going to sing in front of an audience again. 

He doesn't, though, and when Zayn takes him gently by the elbow and begins steering him past the barn he follows easily enough. 

They round the far side of the barn and Harry sees it, even though he can't tell at first quite what _it_ is. He has no reference point for it, and he stops to gaze at it in wonderment. 

It's a house made of sunflowers. 

Out of the corner of his eye he can see Zayn's sharp, delighted smile, and he knows he's been caught out. There's no way he'll be able to play this off as unimpressive. 

"Was this here already?" he says finally, looking at Zayn and then striding up to the narrow gap that forms a door in the sunflower stalks. 

"Nah, planted it this spring," Zayn says. "They grow fast and they're dead easy, I just let 'em be, mostly." 

Harry puts his hand through the gap. It feels cooler inside, shadier. 

"Go on," Zayn says, and pushes on his shoulder until Harry ducks under the arch of broad leaves and finds himself in a circular room, breathing in the green scent of the world in here. 

The ceiling is low and Harry has to stoop to avoid disturbing the canopy of flowers and leaves. He sits carefully down in the grass and watches Zayn slip in beside him, a shadow amongst the shadows. He can hear the low hum of bees above them, of the breeze ruffling the sunflowers. He looks at Zayn under the dappled half-sunlight filtering in from above and is arrested by how familiar and different he is, at once. 

"Sick, innit?" Zayn says, squinting up at the ceiling. "I read about it online and Gigi was like, go ahead, you know, because it's good for the bees, and all." 

"She's like, working?" Harry asks. 

Zayn nods. "And I mean, like... She knows about. She knows we've been talking, like." He clears his throat. "She's givin' me space." 

Harry wants to dig his fingers under the edge of that and peel it back to examine the underside. He wants to know what words Zayn used with his girlfriend to describe what they're doing together, what they're trying to accomplish. He wants to pin Zayn to the grass in this impossible sunflower house and interrogate him the way he never did three years ago when it all went tits up between them. 

"Oh," he says, instead. "That's nice of her." 

"She's the best," Zayn says, and pats his jeans pockets down until he comes up with a lighter and a beautifully rolled joint. "You want?" 

For a house made of flowers there's surprisingly poor ventilation. Harry winds up on his back in the grass watching the fug of smoke waft above them, through pillars of sunlight and shadow, Zayn sprawled out a couple of feet away. They pass the joint back and forth until it's burned down to the roach end and then Harry turns his head to watch Zayn sip it delicately, pinched between the very tips of his finger and thumb, until he can't anymore and he has to grind it out in the dirt. 

They used to smoke like this when they were younger, breathless and stupid, in the backs of buses, in hotel bathrooms with the fan on. Zayn was the first person to get Harry properly high: he'd taken in a deep hit and leaned forward, pressing his lovely mouth against Harry's and exhaling until they both had to cough, and laugh, and cough some more. The first years they'd all been together had seemed like some endless summer, when friendship bled into something else, sometimes. When he could kiss Zayn and have it mean nothing and everything at the same time.

They lay in the dry grass together until the sun reaches its apex over the roof of the sunflower house, making them both squint into the light, making it heat up inside. Zayn rolls to the cool edge of the enclosure where it's still shady and Harry mirrors him on the opposite side. They eye one another, animals in a pen, like any of the other ones here. 

If Harry tried to touch him now - something simple, even, palm to palm - it would mean too much.

"I didn't mean to lose everybody," Zayn says finally, so plaintively that Harry wonders if he's even still stoned at all. Harry feels very stoned, and embarrassed for it. 

"You didn't," he tells Zayn. "You could never. Liam -" 

"Only time I know I'm still friends with Liam is, he mentions me in an interview and my notifications go crazy," Zayn says. "Talk to Niall now and again, but like. I dunno, it sounds stupid now but I genuinely thought we'd all come through it okay, after." 

Harry winces. 

"Okay, it couldn't be helped with you," Zayn says. "I'm not taking the blame for that one, but everybody else, like. We just got so far apart so fast." 

Harry remembers it, how they'd done a dozen of the most labor-intensive rehearsals he'd ever been in and then they were a four piece, ready to pretend it always was that way. How Zayn's not written a pop song since. 

"Why aren't you doing this with them?" he asks. He wishes he could Postmates a bottle of water directly to this flower hut in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. Christ, he's stoned. 

"I dunno," Zayn says. "You're the one who showed up, you tell me." 

Harry presses his cheek into the cool grass. He's moving so slowly, he doesn't remember to be wary of bugs or bacteria or the pH of the soil ruining the delicate ecosystem his dermatologist is trying to foster on his acne-prone forehead. 

"We should bring them out," he says, his mouth moving long before his mind can process what he's saying. "Y'know. We could all make nice." 

Zayn snorts, and Harry laughs, and it's not until later when they're grating fresh parmesan onto a frozen pizza and Zayn's asking for Louis' phone number that Harry realizes what he's committed to. Zayn's not the only one who's let the others drift away, he's not the only one with baggage. He passes Zayn his phone anyway. 

There's no stopping it now.

-

There's something to be said about using your body to work. 

It's not like going to the gym is _easy,_ or learning to box hadn't taken effort, but there's a difference, Harry thinks as he hefts a burlap sack of chicken feed over his shoulder, between working out and _working._

Zayn is ropy with new muscle, his twiggy arms flexing as he maneuvers a wheelbarrow. Zayn has always had a pretty-boy body, well-balanced and elegant. He makes Harry feel too big sometimes, too clumsy. 

There is a bead of sweat cutting a swift course down Zayn's throat, and for a moment Harry wants to _be_ it. The sweat on his neck, or a flower in his garden, or... They rarely touch one another, here; Harry is more casual about touching a stranger in conversation at a coffee counter than he is about touching Zayn, someone he's known for over a third of his life. Harry wants to touch him and be touched by him without consequence, without the symbolism he'd ascribe to it. 

Zayn is cutting gourds from the vine in one of his raised vegetable beds with an intuition that's strange to watch: he picks a squash up from the ground and twists it in place, so that the vine strains, and takes a deep breath like he can smell if it's ripe. Maybe he can. Maybe you learn to do things like that when you become a farmer. Zayn cuts the vine and stacks the squash on top of others in the wheelbarrow before moving further along the row, knee-walking down, getting his jeans dirty. 

Sweat is getting in Harry's eyes. 

Against all odds, Louis has agreed to come out for a handful of days between X Factor tapings. Zayn has a _Songbirds of North America_ wall calendar hanging in the kitchen, and they've marked in Louis' visit in Sharpie, no escaping it. Harry's been in touch with Liam and Niall as well, whose schedules are more exacting but who both, somehow, seem to think visiting is both an acceptable idea and, bizarrely, a potentially good time. Harry's already cancelled his return flight, made vague plans for later in the summer instead so he can mediate all these visits if he has to.

He wonders if they've all agreed to come out because they each want a chance to laugh at him and Zayn pretending to make nice. 

There's been a persistent problem all summer with snails getting into the strawberry bed. Harry is spreading plastic lids out around the perimeter of the bed and then filling each with a couple millimeters of light beer, a home remedy Zayn found on the internet. It's an easy excuse as to why there's always piss-yellow American beer in the fridge, even though they've both been drinking it out on the porch at night. 

It matches well with the hard physical labor of the daytime. 

Harry imagines himself as a day laborer coming home to drink cheap beer and watch a football game. Harry imagines himself as a person who fits in in middle America. Harry imagines himself as somebody no one has ever found remarkable. He tries to apply the same criteria to Zayn and is left bamboozled. They are, neither of them, cut out for this. They're doing it anyway. 

"How do you decide what you grow out here?" Harry asks. 

Zayn is walking towards him with the wheelbarrow, piled high with summer squash. He parks it next to Harry's strawberry project and gives him an animated shrug. 

"When I'm at the store I just ask the lady what's easy," he says, and smiles sheepishly, like he knows how stupid that sounds. "I knew I wanted, like, functional stuff. I dunno, it's just a garden, innit? Not proper farming, don't have to think about crop rotations and all that." 

"I guess not," Harry says. He looks at the overabundance of squash. "You know how to cook those?" 

Zayn just laughs. 

It turns out Zayn has a neighbor down the road a couple of miles who trades produce with him - she keeps fruit trees and is too old to be down on her knees growing squash, and she has no idea who either of them are, only that they don't really know what they're doing. 

Zayn didn't have a driving license for so long that Harry can't quite comprehend him, comfortable behind the wheel of the farm's solitary pickup truck. He keeps his left hand at the top of the wheel and rests his right on the gear shift, casual as anything. There are two canvas bags of early harvest pears in the bed of the truck, and they're several squash lighter for their efforts. Zayn's neighbor - a friendly grandmother named Sandra - had even written down her recipe for squash lasagna and given it to Harry for reference. 

On the drive back Harry asks Zayn what he likes best about the farm, because he hasn't asked yet, and it seems like something he should find out. "You've stuck with it for like a year now," he says. "I'm just surprised." 

Zayn shrugs and drums his thumbs against the steering wheel. "It's good work," he says, finally. "And it makes me better at things I'm not good at." 

"Like... Herding sheep? Or..." 

"Like feeling," Zayn says. "And acting. When I'm here I have to _be here."_

When they get back they spend the afternoon eating pears out on the porch with the front door flung wide. Harry brings Zayn's guitar outside and spends ages getting it in tune. It's an ancient dreadnaught with a neck like a railroad tie, thick and unyielding, and the strings are so old it won't stay in tune for more than a couple of songs. They sing a little together, for fun: the slim intersection of music they both love, Stevie Wonder and Prince and Pink Floyd. 

Harry lets himself get used to just existing with Zayn. Having spent several years now pretending that Zayn was a phantom, a bad dream, it takes some getting used to. 

Zayn's voice is heavy and smooth, like a river stone. It's not like Harry's forgotten, or like he'd been able to avoid hearing Pillowtalk out in shops or anything, it just... Zayn's voice has a clarity that Harry'd forgotten he was envious of. It can sound round as the chime of a bell. Harry can feel it in his own body, like he's been struck with the same hammer. Like they're tuned together. 

When they'd all first got put together and Liam was doing the lion's share of the singing and Louis was being a good sport about not singing at all, Zayn was the voice they'd turned to when they needed to cut through a stacked harmony, to be the stone dropped in the whirling river of the rest of their voices. They'd all been young, and they'd all been special, in their ways, Harry guesses. But it's strange and familiar all at once, when Zayn opens his lovely mouth and sings sweet and dark as a nightingale and Harry feels his own voice falter, cowed by him. 

Harry plays the simple chords under "Great Gig in the Sky" and Zayn vocalizes over them, casual and effortless, as the sun sets over the farm. 

"Do you ever think about doing music like that?" Harry asks him, after. 

"What, prog rock?" Zayn laughs at him. "Nah." 

"Why not? 'S just music." 

"It's great music," Zayn agrees. "Some of it. I'll leave it for you, though, yeah?" 

It leaves Harry breathless. Maybe Zayn'd just heard _Sign of the Times_ on the radio, or in the Google advert, or... But maybe he'd listened to it. Sat with it. Maybe he'd wanted to hear what Harry could really do on his own. 

Maybe he'd liked it. 

"Louis' here tomorrow, yeah?" Harry says, instead. 

"Yeah," Zayn agrees. "Tomorrow and tomorrow."

-

Louis hasn't planned ahead enough to reserve a car or a driver, so he arrives by what must be a laughably expensive Uber. The driver can't take him past the end of the long drive, because of the gate, and because the farm has "some serious Children of the Corn vibes, man," and Louis had flung a handful of cash into the passenger seat on top of the payment from his phone because the app hadn't given him an option to tip what he felt like was a fair amount.

Louis relays this to Harry and Zayn between dramatic panting as he tries to catch his breath after dragging his suitcase up the half-mile long drive. 

"Why's your place so fucking far out, anyway?" he says to Zayn, bent over, hands on his knees. 

Zayn stares at him. "It's a farm." 

"There's urban farms," Louis says, wheezing. "Do a rooftop garden, I could get a cab across town in New York w'less trouble." 

"That's what I said," Harry says. "Brooklyn Grange has these courses on keeping rooftop apiaries, I've been meaning to take one." 

Louis rolls his eyes, even though they're on the same side. "You would," he says, and he exchanges a look with Zayn, and it's exactly like it's always been, somehow. Louis and Zayn boxing him out of their jokes, laughing at him, thinking he won't notice or not caring if he does. 

This is a terrible idea, he thinks. This is the worst way it could possibly have gone. 

As they tour the farm it becomes clear that it's not the _worst_ possible way - Zayn and Louis are sniping at each other over the bones of the conversation. When they pass through the pasture where Zayn's two goats are grazing Louis says, 

"Never would've thought you'd be mature enough to have kids." 

Zayn shrugs. "I got them on purpose, difference between you 'n' me." 

Harry shrinks into the background and tries to figure out why he feels left out, when they're just being awful to each other. 

When they get back to the house Louis turns to Zayn and tells him, "I'm impressed. This is as nice a place as I can think of to avoid your career." 

And Zayn actually smiles, and slugs him on the arm. "That's what I thought when I bought it," he says. "And you, still living in Simon's pockets? Thought we were all negotiating out of that as soon as we could, like." 

"You know me an' my daddy issues," Louis says. 

Harry stares at both of them. 

The difference, he supposes, between Zayn and Louis and himself, is that maybe the fissure between them goes deeper, but so does the friendship. Harry can feel an illogical jealousy brewing in him and he swallows it down. He tries gamely to be happy that there seems to be a relationship there left to salvage. He'd thought... 

In Harry's less generous moments - of which, he'll admit, there are many - he feels indignant towards Zayn on Louis' behalf. Because maybe Zayn and Harry hadn't been speaking much towards the end, maybe the wheels had already come off there, but Louis... It had fallen to the rest of them to put him back together after Zayn had split, and again after he failed to show at Louis' performance when Jay died, and it was just... It was a really shit thing of Zayn to do, letting him go like that. 

Harry feels justifiably annoyed at how pally they're being, he decides. He's meant to broker some peace treaty between them and they've gone and done it themselves without having any talk about it, or anything. Same as it's always been. 

"You just come out here because you've not got anyone to argue with in your real life?" Zayn asks later, while they're making dinner together. "Gotta say, man, I was surprised you agreed to it." 

Louis gestures to the both of them, to the kitchen and the house beyond. "What, everybody knows my two favorite people to hang out with are the lad who hung me out to dry and the one everybody thinks I've been dating in secret since I was a teenager, right?" 

Harry winces. Zayn doesn't turn around from the stove, doesn't react. 

"Nah, truth be told, Nialler put me up to it," Louis continues. "I called him after you'd texted me, like. Asked him what I should do." 

"God, and he told you to come here?" Harry asks. "Thought he was meant to be the reasonable one, these days." 

"I dunno," Louis says. "I think he likes the idea that we're all gonna be alright with each other someday. He's not, like, dramatically fallen out with any of us, so. Wants us to be able to make nice at his wedding, or whatever." 

"He'd have to stick with a bird more than three months if he wants to have a wedding we can all reunite at," Zayn says, not unkindly. 

"He's seeing a nice girl right now," Louis says. "Seems proper serious." He sounds edgier all of a sudden, like he doesn't approve. 

"Nice, like, pretty? Or nice, like she actually likes him?" Harry asks. 

"Both, I guess," Louis says. "I don't know. You know Niall, he doesn't kiss and tell."

"Well, no, but you must've asked," Harry says. He's prying, if only to get off the subject of how none of them get along with one another. 

"Must I have?" Louis sneers. "I've got my own things going on, I've been bloody busy with X Factor and all." 

"Well, yeah, but," Zayn says. He's turned off the stove and whatever he's making - some rice thing with onions and garlic in - is smelling the whole place up. "You love a gossip with Nialler." 

"And you've been, like, calling him up asking his advice, apparently," Harry puts in. "What, did he tell you not to say anything to us?" 

It's not nice to gang up on Louis, really, but he and Zayn are so rarely on the same side about anything. They exchange glances. Louis' eyes have turned flinty and sharp. 

"It just doesn't seem like it's any of our business who he's shagging anymore," he says curtly. "You could ask him yourself if you weren't so wrapped up in whether or not you're going to decide to be friends again, something you could've figured out on the phone without dragging the rest of us into it, if you ask me." 

Zayn holds his hands up in surrender. 

"Sorry, mate," he says. "Didn't know I'd touched a nerve." 

"You didn't," Louis says sourly, and he gets up and stalks out of the kitchen. 

"I did," Zayn says to Harry when they're alone. "I never know where the landmines are with him anymore." 

"I don't know if I ever did in the first place," Harry replies. "Always trying to jump out of the way when it's already too late, me." 

Zayn pats him on the shoulder and gets back to sorting out dinner, dishing risotto into mismatched bowls, bringing Harry a glass of water unasked. 

"I'm always forgetting to drink water," he explains as he fills another glass at the tap. "When I first got here I'd be wondering, like, why do I feel like crap all the time, and Gigi would always ask me when the last time I had anything to drink was, and that was always the answer." 

"I'm very well-hydrated, thank you," Harry says. 

"I know," Zayn says. "But it's easier for me to remember for me, like, if I'm remembering it for somebody else." 

Harry is surprised and touched, and he glances at Zayn across the table while they eat dinner. He tries very hard to figure Zayn out, something he thought he'd done once and maybe never had. 

If they'd been older when the band started, maybe things would've been better, or different. Maybe Liam wouldn't have been forced into the awkward position of responsible spokesperson, a role he's shrugged whenever possible since. Maybe Niall would've worked out some of his trust issues before fame could scar them into him. 

Maybe the fans would've recognized and appreciated Zayn's capacity for care taking. Maybe he would've been the sweet one, and nobody would have to be the bad boy. 

Maybe they would've given Harry fewer falsetto parts on the first record, and he wouldn't have had to struggle through "Gotta Be You" every show after his voice dropped. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It was a universe of maybes out there. 

Eventually Louis gets hungry and comes back in looking sheepish, and Zayn gives him a bowl he'd kept warm in the oven, and for the moment all's forgiven. 

When they're all going to bed - three individual but simultaneous decisions - Harry hangs back, watching Zayn through the half-open bathroom door as he brushes his teeth and washes his face. Zayn understands that people have expectations of him, because of how he looks. He hates to be seen when he isn't put together, perfectly in control of his appearance. 

Harry thinks of every time he's gone on a jog in a ripped t-shirt and sweatpants with a face full of zits and a scraggly mustache he's neglected to shave for days and thanks a higher power he's not as anxiously beautiful as Zayn is. 

"Some things never change," Louis says quietly from behind Harry. "He knows where his power is." 

"Don't be mean," Harry says. "You know he could be hideous and still sing like he does and it'd be plenty." 

Louis shrugs. "It's the combination, then. But he does know it, though. This farm boy thing isn't the total transformation he wants it to be." 

They're whispering, but they both go silent as Zayn shuts off the bathroom light and crosses the hall to his own closed bedroom door. "Night, lads," he says to them, before shutting himself in. 

"I think if he wanted it to be a total transformation he probably wouldn't be releasing music," Harry tells Louis after a moment. He doesn't know why he feels like stepping up and defending Zayn, only it doesn't seem fair. Zayn's face and his voice are things he can't help, really. They put pressure on him, and he's proven himself to be fragile under the weight. 

Louis raises one shoulder and drops it again, like Zayn's interior life isn't worth the effort of a complete shrug. 

"I guess. I just don't know what to make of him anymore, really," he says finally. "I'm surprised you do." 

"I don't either," Harry corrects. "But I said I'd try, so..." 

Louis pats him on the shoulder. After all these years, it still feels unnatural to touch one another. Harry had trained himself off Louis' touches early on, and they spark a strange discomfort in him now, like he's gotten slightly allergic. 

"I'm sorry about tonight," Harry says. "It's none of my business, we shouldn't have, like, both come after you. I don't even know why I pushed it." 

"It's whatever," Louis says. There in the darkened upstairs hall of Zayn's farm house, with Louis' brambly accent gone gentle, Harry feels a rush of fondness for him. He remembers why they'd been such close friends once. Louis is a minefield of annoyances and poor moods, but he forgives easily, and he's generous with his patience. All of a sudden Harry's glad it's Louis who's come out first. 

"I'm glad you're here," Harry says, in the interest of honesty. 

Louis makes a face. "Go to bed, Harold," he says, and Harry does.

-

It's strange to see the days getting shorter, even as the whole glory of late summer yawns before them. West of the farm there's a violent sunset painting the sky above the treeline, all pink and orange with clouds the sallow purple of a healing bruise. 

There's been a cheap, sugary rosé chilling in the door of the fridge for longer than Harry's been at the farm, and he pours himself a tall glass and takes it out to the porch to watch the show. 

"What's that piss you're drinking?" Louis asks. 

He's been alternating between skulking around the house avoiding them and throwing himself into farm work, not that he's much good at it. Harry'd thought: good to get Louis' visit out of the way first, since it's bound to be the hardest for all of them. He keeps regretting it, or wishing Liam or Niall were there as well, to keep the peace. 

Instead of answering, Harry hands Louis the glass, and Louis sniffs it and wrinkles his nose. "That's the worst kind of hangover you're in for." 

"I'm still young enough to not really get hangovers," Harry says primly. It's not true, but it'll needle at Louis, which is decent entertainment for not much effort. 

Louis scowls and heads back into the house, returning a moment later with three cans of light beer on the plastic rings of a sixpack. 

The sunset turns from pink to purple to indigo, that saturated dark that only happens on nights like this. It was too hot earlier, and Harry's still warm, but the breeze has him wishing he'd brought a jacket out. 

Louis finishes his first beer, then his second. Harry drinks the wine in gulps - it really is too sweet, he's already getting a headache. 

"It's been eighteen months," Louis says finally. 

"What?" Harry says, stupidly. Then, "Oh." 

"Yeah."

It's completely dark around them, the long afternoon gone and the lights in the house mostly off. Zayn goes to bed early when he's out here; it'd taken Harry some getting used to. 

"D'you..." Harry starts. He's made such a habit of keeping Louis at a distance, this conversation could go anywhere. "I mean, you've got stuff coming out still, right?" 

There's no way Louis is putting off plans because he thinks the band will come back. If anyone has the clarity to know what's going on, it's Louis. 

Beside him on the porch steps Louis shrugs. "Been writing, yeah. I've got a single I'm hanging onto til after X Factor's done." 

A non-answer to his non-question, then. They lapse back into silence. Louis opens the third beer and Harry takes the opportunity to nip back inside, refill his glass, grab one of Zayn's big cardigans where it's hanging by the door. He's warm now, from the wine and stumbling through the house in the dark, but he knows he'll want it, or Louis will. 

"I don't really know what I expected," he says, sitting back down. He's had another long slug of the wine and he thinks they ought to have some sort of a heart to heart, for old times' sake. "With the time off, like. I guess I knew I wanted to work, but I thought..." He studies Louis' familiar profile, the sweep of his fringe over his forehead. "I thought, like, you'd be working with Liam more." 

As soon as he says it he knows it's true: he'd figured he'd keep himself busy, and so would Niall, but it'd always seemed like Louis and Liam had together-type plans. Writing, or producing or something. He says as much to Louis, and is surprised when Louis' face goes just a bit chilly. 

"I think we both thought so, too," he says. "Doesn't always work out like you plan it." 

There's ample evidence for that, not least of which is that the _two of them_ are sat on _Zayn's_ front step having a proper chat about it. 

"Yeah, no, but..." Harry pauses to drink. "I dunno. I guess it just seemed like out of all of us, the two of you would be... Solid, or something." 

Louis shrugs again. "Honestly, mate, we're working on it. Niall's been after me about it, _what happened with Liam,_ like, and I'm making the fuckin' effort. We've been texting, and all." 

"What did happen with Liam, if you don't mind my asking?" 

"Nothing," Louis says honestly. "Just went in different directions, mind the pun." 

Harry waits for him to say more, because he's got that pinched look that means he wants to. What an odd bit of Louis' ephemera to have held onto all these years. 

"I think we both expected it'd feel the same, working together, like, we wouldn't have to make an effort at it? But he's all over the place and I'm, I like, I've got responsibilities, I can't be, you know, jetting off someplace for a writing retreat on no notice, I've got a kid." 

"Liam's got a kid." 

"You'd never know it," Louis says darkly, and then he catches himself. "That's what I mean, though - I always think we're going to be on the same page and we're just not. Feel like I have an easier time with _him_ -" He jerks his head in the direction of the house, where Zayn is asleep. "- than Payno these days." 

"I wouldn't say that," Harry says. "Or, like. I don't know, I guess. Not seen much of Liam, myself." 

"Color me fuckin' surprised." 

Cicadas shrill into the gathering night. A strong breeze ruffles the scrub grass and trees and fields. Above them the sky is a mess of stars, so many and so bright over the dark farmland that the two of them are perfectly visible to one another. Harry could easily find his way to his car, parked a ways down the long drive, by starlight. 

He's been in cities too long. 

"Anyway," Louis says, and he clears his throat. "Like I said, I'm working on it. Niall won't let up, so." 

"Been seeing the two of you around," Harry says. "On the 'gram." 

"Don't say that, you sound like an idiot." Louis is laughing, though, the strange mood diffusing around them. "He's been good, yeah." 

Harry gives Louis what he hopes is a subtle but significant look. It's not that it's so surprising, really, that they'd spend time with one another, but... It is, he guesses. He'd sort of expected himself to be the one staying close with Niall, and it's not that he _isn't,_ really, but. He isn't, as much. Anymore. 

"What?" Louis says. He's fiddling with the pull tab on the top of one of the beer cans, and it comes off between his fingertips. 

"Nothing," Harry says. "It's nice, right? I dunno, it feels like... We all ought to be spending time together, every once in a while." He guesses that's what this summer is about, the lot of them getting reacquainted with each other with their new, grownup minds. "I'm glad you have each other." 

Louis laughs. "You say it like we're in mourning. Like I met him in a post-boyband support group." 

"Oh, you didn't? I was going to ask you to say hello to Chris Kirkpatrick for me next meeting." It's a stupid joke, but they both laugh. 

What goes unacknowledged between them is the way Niall had been the one who wasn't ready to give it all up. What Harry doesn't say is that Niall seems to have done very well for himself, and that Louis... Hasn't, yet. 

"If I'm honest, he's like... Been aces for me, the last few months," Louis says. "Touring like he is, still gettin' me on FaceTime, sendin' me texts. It's, like... I dunno, it's weird being somebody else's 'somebody back home', d'you know what I mean? Like I used to always be calling and keeping things going and everything with El, and me mum, and everybody. Weird to be on the other side of that." 

"But, good though, right?" 

Louis' entire face goes soft in the cool starlight. "Yeah," he says. "Definitely good."

-

Louis has FaceTimed with Niall every day he's been at the farm. It's sweet: Niall in bed after his show at Red Rocks, rumpled and dimly lit on Louis' phone screen while Louis sits out on the porch having a cigarette, just catching up; Louis getting ahold of him for five minutes in the morning to tell him something interesting he learned about goats, or tomatoes, or the weather trends of western Pennsylvania. One evening the three of them, Harry, Louis, and Zayn, all troop out to lay down in the center of one of the fields and watch the International Space Station go by overhead. Harry catches Louis taking a sneaky photo of it, a bright, slow-moving bullet of light in the burgundy dusk. 

His phone camera isn't hi-res enough to capture it, really, but he sends it to Niall anyway. 

It's funny, how Louis' missing Niall makes Harry miss him, too. He says as much to Zayn one morning while they're checking over the horses' hooves together, which really means Zayn is checking them and Harry is trying to figure out what he's checking for. 

"Dunno, I didn't realize I was missing him, I guess," he says finally. 

Zayn runs his thumb over the edge of one of Mandarin's horseshoes. "Me too," he says, finally. "Been missing him, too." 

"You could call him," Harry says. "He'd like hearing from you, I think." 

_"You_ could call him," Zayn counters. "I dunno, think it was easy for us to take him for granted, like." 

Harry follows him around the stable as he walks around to brush out Mandarin's mane. She's so patient with them; Harry's still kind of afraid of her big, alien eyes. 

"Like, us, the band? Or you and me specifically?" Harry asks.

Zayn sweeps the brush through Mandarin's mane, unsnaring a knot carefully and not meeting Harry's eyes. 

"You know. Us, the narcissists." 

It's an unexpected gut-punch. Harry recoils slightly. "Okay," he says reproachfully, ready to be defensive. After all, they'd both wanted to get out, and both agreed to go one more round. Zayn had tapped out early and Harry had stuck it out, and that should make them different from one another, shouldn't it?

"You know what I mean," Zayn puts in before Harry can get his thoughts together. "There's a difference between being humble and being stupid, Hazza, it's okay for you to like... Know that you were gonna be successful, after." 

Harry folds his arms. This is a line he hates toeing, knowing how difficult it'll be to really tank his career now. He wants to feel like he's still taking risks. 

"Did you know?" 

Zayn rests his crossed forearms on Mandarin's back and puts his chin on them, looking at Harry with the horse between them. 

"I knew I had a leg up," he said. "But I also, like... I don't know. Lots of people got pretty mad at me, innit?" 

In the jealous aftermath of Zayn's first album release Harry had desperately wanted to find a way to poke holes in its success: he was riding the coattails of the band, he was banking on the scandal of his leaving. When he'd listened to it, though, as objectively as he was able, he'd found it to be an artifact of honesty and authenticity, with good melodies, smart production, and the unimpeachable quality of Zayn's one-of-a-kind voice. It deserved its radio play, as loathe as he still is to admit it. 

Harry searches Zayn's face, doesn't know what he's looking for. Resentment, maybe, or smugness, any petty feeling Harry can feel superior about not having. 

"Like, I don't mean anything by it, mate, but if Niall had given the same performance you did on SNL it would've taken him months to win back the press," Zayn says. His face, unguarded and gazing at Harry, is essentially kind. 

Harry tries not to feel too wounded anyway. That Zayn had sought out one of his performances and had seen his voice fail him spectacularly. It's embarrassing, it makes Harry's face go hot and his chest hollow out around a knot of shame. 

He nods and looks at his own hand resting on Mandarin's shoulder. "You're right," he says. 

"I am, sometimes," Zayn agrees. He comes around to Mandarin's other side and ushers Harry out of the stable. "I didn't mean to make you feel bad," he says. "Only, I think it is important to be realistic. It's important to know what your assets are." 

"It's weird he and Louis have gotten so close lately, isn't it?" Harry says, skillfully and seamlessly changing the subject in a way that definitely does not make Zayn raise his eyebrows at him. 

They've been making their way back outside, and as the brilliant sun hits them and Zayn raises a hand to shield his eyes, he says, 

"Not really. The rest of us have all had a turn, right?" 

"A turn at what?" Harry asks. 

"Take your pick," Zayn says, setting off towards the house. "Being Louis' favorite. Being the one Niall decides to take care of. Only seems natural it'd go this way eventually." 

Harry tries to tease those concepts apart, trailing behind Zayn and wishing he'd thought to wear sunglasses. The morning has grown intense and hot, and he squints at Zayn's back as they cross the garden. 

He guesses it's true: he'd done an early turn inside the bubble of Louis' singular love, and when it'd gone all muddled he'd been replaced by Zayn, and when Zayn left Liam had stepped in to pick up the pieces. And Harry can remember Niall at bootcamp introducing everyone around to his nice roommate Liam, helping him make friends and have fun and take himself a little less seriously. Then he supposed Niall'd moved on to Zayn as well, when everything Zayn had done for a little while had landed him in gossip rags in a bad way. Niall had devoted himself to treating Zayn kindly, like he could balance the scales on the rest of the world. 

And then it'd been different, when Zayn left, but he guesses if Niall had any intention at all it was to take care of Harry. They'd been so close those last few months, with Niall trying very hard to make sure Harry was enjoying himself, and not resenting the fact that he was still there, that he hadn't left even when he'd wanted to. Even now it's strange to be outside the high beam of Niall's affection, it'd been so bright. 

It's funny how Niall always knows exactly what's best for everybody except himself. 

Harry shakes his head to clear it. Ahead of him, Zayn is stooped over examining some runner beans as they wind themselves up a lattice. Some things are still simple. Harry's heart leaps in his chest, watching Zayn being gentle with growing things. He's always loving Zayn, and being infuriated by Zayn, and getting confused about Zayn. It turns him about so. 

"We should wake Louis up eventually, shouldn't we?" Harry asks, and Zayn laughs. 

"I'll go. You go see if there's any food anywhere in the kitchen," he says. "And then we'll order pancakes from the diner in town and I'll go pick it up because I'm pretty sure there's, like, nothing." 

He's right - there's no cereal or pop tarts or anything, just a bowl of apricots and a bunch of instant dinners and too many eggs Harry doesn't have the energy to turn into an omelette. They all call the diner together, all adding on sides of potatoes and bacon and rye toast and sausages. Zayn goes off in his truck and brings it all back and it's like old times, ordering too much off the room service menu just because you're with your best friends, and you can.

-

Six days pass that way and at the end of them a chauffeured car comes to collect Louis at the end of Zayn's driveway. 

"Take care of yourself, man," Louis says, hugging Harry and clapping him hard on the back. "Look me up when you're back in LA." 

"I will," Harry says, and is surprised to find he means it. "Hey - good luck with the rest of X Factor. It's about time one of us won, it should be you." 

Louis laughs and slugs Harry on the shoulder and glances at Zayn, standing several feet away, watching them. 

"C'mon then," Louis says, opening his arms. Zayn steps carefully into them. 

"Thanks for coming out here," he says into Louis' shoulder. "I missed you." 

"Ah, lad," Louis says. He tilts his head, and the light changes just enough, the sun ducking behind a slow moving cloud, that they both seem older, more angular. A sharp thing nested against a sharp thing. Knives in a drawer. 

Harry and Zayn stand at the end of the drive and wave to his car until it disappears around a bend in the road. 

When they get back to the house Zayn disappears into his bedroom and Harry goes out for a long walk around the perimeter of the farm. Without Louis there everything seems less immediate, less connected to the real world. He walks beside the chickenwire fence that separates Zayn's land from the wild forest beyond it as though in a dream. This property is an organized speck inside a wild unknown. 

This planet is an organized speck inside a wild unknown. 

There's still work to be done, even if Zayn seems to be avoiding it. The farm has four grouchy sheep that Zayn is always bringing out in the mornings and herding back into the barn in the evenings, and Harry passes their field during the tail end of the long afternoon. He clambers over the fence and approaches one. Its funny little teddy bear face gazes up at him. 

_You don't pet sheep, do you?_ Harry thinks. _No, that doesn't sound right._ He holds the back of his hand up carefully to the sheep's face, the way you could to coax a stray cat closer. It fondles him with its strange animal lips. 

"You're going to get yourself bitten." 

Harry shouldn't really be surprised to hear Zayn behind him - there's only so long Zayn can sulk before he has to attend to his work. It's one of the reasons, Harry suspects, that Zayn had wanted this place, and wanted to take care of it by himself. 

Zayn is leaning against one of the fenceposts with his forearms resting on top, and his chin on top of them. In the long afternoon light he looks lean and golden. Not so much a farmer as a barn cat, his big, feline eyes gazing across the fence at Harry. 

"Come on in, then," Harry says. "Show me what to do." 

There's a gate further down along the fence and Zayn goes all the way over to it to come in, to spare himself the indignity of climbing over like Harry had. He has a bucket of grain dangling from one elegant hand and the telltale white flash of a joint tucked behind his ear. A pair of ludicrous Balenciaga sunglasses dangles from the neck of his threadbare t-shirt. Sometimes he's so Zayn that Harry can hardly look at him. 

Zayn starts shaking the bucket and the sheep all turn to him and start trotting over, their heads lolling, their spindly legs carrying them by some unlikely intersection of biology and magic. With enough layers of abstraction every animal becomes deeply funny to Harry. Here on the farm it's easy to start treating them like people, to forget that when they run their knees bend the wrong way and their ears flop around and they gather around Zayn's beanpole legs like he's got all the answers in the world, which is patently false. 

"Here I thought you were going to herd them," Harry says, following the sheep over. "And you're just a charlatan with a bucket of grain." 

Zayn shrugs grandly. "Don't have a dog here, all I've got's bribery." 

"Well," Harry says. "Let me have some." 

Zayn hands him the bucket and they walk side by side towards the barn, the sheep following and bleating gently behind them. The barn is more of a series of barns, squat and dark and connected over time by little clapboard corridors. There's a big main building where the horses' stables are, and where most of the farming equipment Zayn doesn't know how to use lives, and then branching off are the buildings which house the sheep, the goats, where all the feed and perishable supplies are kept. The farm came with a very nice milking parlor which has thus far sat unused because Zayn doesn't have any cows. 

"Milking them freaks me out," he'd told Harry seriously when he'd first taken him around the barns. 

"They're just cows," Harry'd said. "I expect they're bred to be, like, okay with it." 

Zayn had shrugged. "It's just really, like... Don't laugh, but that's like, a little too intimate for me. They can't even get to know me or anything before I'm, like -" and he'd made a crude gesture that had Harry laughing. 

"You want to take her out to dinner first? Third date rule?"

Zayn had whacked him on the arm. "Don't be gross, you know what I mean. Like wiv the hens and the sheep and all I'm just, like I'm literally there to bring them food and clean their hooves out and make sure they're happy. I dunno, it just seems like an unbalanced relationship, keeping cows." 

What a strange farm boy he is, Harry thinks, watching Zayn usher the sheep into their pen and dipping his hands into the feed bucket so they can eat from his cupped palms. What a courteous weirdo. 

Zayn clucks over the sheep and ruffles their heads and brushes his hands off on his jeans. 

"So how do you think it went? With Louis, I mean," Harry asks him later, when they're standing in the last available square of orange sunlight on the porch sharing the joint. Everything's gone indigo and black around them, the shadows cartoonishly long, the fields empty and flat. Humanity could be wiped out everywhere but this farm and they wouldn't know it. 

Zayn frowns at the end of the joint, which keeps refusing to stay lit. He cups his hand around the flame of his lighter and hollows out his cheeks as he re-lights it, a tableau so familiar Harry has to blink hard to dislodge a dozen of identical memories. 

"What d'you mean?" Zayn asks finally, the words coming out on a heavy roll of smoke. "We didn't kill each other, it's progress, innit?" 

Harry takes the joint from Zayn's hand and tucks it into the corner of his own mouth, taking shallow draws from it while he thinks. 

"I guess," he says, finally. "I mean, got the worst of it over with first, right?" He's not entirely sure if he's talking about Louis or himself. 

Zayn shrugs. Twilight just seems to emphasize the way he looks, always like he's stepped out of an oil painting. Looking at him is an act of decadence. 

"Did you mend anything, though?" 

The sun ducks behind the trees at last, turning the light they're in from amber to grey. They're suspended in an old photograph, all their colors muted, all their complicated history simplified. Christ, Harry is stoned. 

"I don't know if we had anything left to mend," Zayn says. "Some things you don't come back from. Maybe you get alright with yourself, with what happened, but it's not... Haz, it's never going to be the same." 

"No, I know," Harry says. He does understand, it's just... If Zayn and Louis can't mend anything, Zayn and Louis who once meant the world to one another, then what on earth is Harry trying to do here? Where is this even going? 

"It's always been like that, us," Zayn says. "We were put together and we were close, like, because... It's easy. It wasn't something we ever worked at. And we're where we're at now, and it's still easy, just opposite. It's not like I'm pining after how we used to be. Tommo's not either." 

Between the weed and the colorless dusk and the casual way Zayn says it, Harry feels like crying. It's unspeakably sad to him right now, for some reason, like Zayn and Louis had ridden the same bus for a few miles and Zayn had transferred and if they never saw one another again, well, that's how things go, sometimes. Harry feels like a child for wanting it to be more - to have meant more - than that. 

Maybe it hadn't, though. It's not like Harry's calling Louis up all the time himself asking to preserve their significant friendship. 

After a long moment Zayn goes into the house and turns a light on, and the front porch is washed with yellow light. When he comes back out he hands Harry a beer and they sit in silence, watching the invisible fingers of the wind ruffle the tall grass. 

"Liam's just texted me," Zayn says then. "Confirming his travel reservation. He's going to be here on Thursday." 

Night has fallen in earnest. Everything past the radius of lamplight from the house is silvered by the stars. Shapes shift and form and dissipate in the fields. Harry drinks his beer. He watches Zayn take a dimly lit selfie, delete it, take another, and send it to Gigi. He thinks about how he hasn't gone this long without getting his picture taken in eight years.

-

The same day Liam is scheduled to visit, Harry finds out that Zayn and Gigi have broken up. 

Of course it's not Zayn who tells him. Zayn is middling around with the farm's solitary tractor, trying to get it running again, the instruction manual spread open and held down with stones on the ground beside him. Harry can see him from the upstairs window shining a flashlight down into the engine. 

It's by way of an incomprehensibly long chain of gossipy people - Gigi mentioned it to Taylor, who had to tell Jack Antanoff because of a party he was planning that he might've invited them all to. Jack had alluded to something in a joke he told to a producer friend of his, somebody who'd run into Louis at a session for one of his X Factor protegés, and not known enough not to ask him about it. And Louis had texted Harry immediately, with liberal use of the shrugging man and eyes emojis. 

_I don't know, he hasn't said anything,_ Harry texts back, and he silences his phone and sticks it in his back pocket before going off to find Zayn. 

Naturally, Zayn is still elbow deep in the dead tractor, his forearms streaked with grease. 

"You think she'll live, doc?" Harry asks, ambling up. 

Zayn sticks out his lower lip and blows the hair out of his face. It falls immediately back into his eyes, unmanageable in the humidity. 

"No," he says easily. "I'm gonna have Leemo take a look at it when he gets here." He snaps the hood shut and pulls a greasy rag out of the back pocket of his jeans, starts cleaning his hands off. 

"I don't expect Liam's had much practice doing this stuff in the last few years," Harry says. "What with all the, y'know." 

Zayn shrugs. "I know. But he'll like to be asked." 

Zayn's confidence where Liam is concerned is both completely expected and completely destabilizing. Liam is impossible to make an enemy of, and he's always been willing to close ranks with Zayn, who had definitely been the first person who'd ever made Liam feel like he might one day have the potential to be _cool._

He hadn't ever quite gotten there, really, but then, Zayn never minded, so. 

"You still planning on heading back to LA?" Zayn asks, swiping grease out from between his beautiful fingers. "After Liam leaves?" 

Things are starting to build up for Harry back home, stuff that needs his signature, people with whom he's meant to be making plans. He'd thought he could go for a few days - a week - and come back with Niall when his tour closes out. 

"Well, I..." Harry starts. He thinks about waking up in his palatial house with its ocean view, no sheep to be let out, no half-full coffee pot with one of Zayn's chipped mugs set out for him in the morning. "About that, Zayn, I was thinking like... There's a lot for you to get done on your own, and I don't have that much going on yet with the tour just done and all." He clears his throat. "I could stay until Nialler does, leave with him." 

Zayn looks at him directly, with the full force of his soft, affectionate face. His mouth draws up on one side. "To help me out, like," he says. 

"If you need me," Harry says. 

"Might do." 

-

When Liam does show up he's not dressed for work at all, in a champagne-colored silk shirt and linen slacks, with an elaborate fruit basket under one arm and a rolling suitcase. He's hired a car to bring him all the way from the airport, and the driver has to make an awkward, several-point turn to get himself facing back down the driveway. 

"Hullo, boys," Liam says, setting his things down and crushing Zayn and Harry both to him. 

His hair is finally starting to grow out. It's been blow dried, but it's wilting slightly in the humidity. He looks good, though, looks fit and happy. The beard makes him look like a grownup, even if the face underneath it is still puppyish and sweet. 

"Good flight?" Zayn asks, leaning back and clapping Liam on the shoulder. 

Liam shrugs. "They're all the same. I've been keeping count, if I keep going at this rate I'll probably have taken a hundred planes this year." 

Zayn grimaces dramatically. "That sounds awful." 

Liam just smiles into the mild sunshine. "It's not so bad. Are you going to show me around?" 

"Yeah, yes, hang on." Zayn puts Liam's suitcase just inside the front door and awkwardly hands the fruit basket off to Harry before putting his hand on Liam's back and leading him away from the house, back towards the gardens. 

Harry stands on the porch with the fruit basket in his arms, unsure of whether he's meant to follow them - offer them plums and grapes at intervals, maybe? - Or if that's Zayn's convenient way of brushing him off, or if Zayn hasn't even thought anything of it. Probably he just wants Liam to feel welcome. 

Harry goes inside and puts the basket down on the kitchen table, and tears into the cellophane wrapping to get a summer-ripened peach for himself. 

It's a very good peach. 

When he's finished it and rinsed his hands there's still no sign of Liam and Zayn, so he sits at the kitchen table and does something he's been putting off: he phones his mum. 

"Hello, angel," she says. He can hear her fussing over something in the background - she's got a garden of her own, after all. "Everything alright?" 

Harry sets about unpacking the fruit basket: peaches and nectarines into a wide, shallow bowl; bananas on the kitchen counter; cellophane and trimmings all into the bin. 

"Of course," he says, pinning the phone between his shoulder and his ear. "I just missed you, I'm allowed to, aren't I?" 

"Well," his mother says, "I suppose that's nice to hear. And you're... Everything's going okay? With Zayn?" 

The list of people who know where Harry is isn't exactly short - there are the necessaries, his assistant, Jeff, his mum and Gemma, now the rest of the lads - but he's kept it pared down as much as possible because of situations like this one: feeling like he's meant to justify staying here as long as he has, like he needs to defend Zayn's kindness and hospitality, or his own soundness of mind. 

"You know," he says, trying to push all those warring impulses aside, "It's actually been really good, I think. For all of us." 

"Tell me about it," his mum says, and he can hear the creak of her settling into one of the chairs at the kitchen table.

So he does: he tells her about Louis' visit, about what Zayn had said when Louis left. He tells her a little of what he's been afraid to admit to himself, what he's been reluctant to examine the shape of: how he and Zayn are becoming close again, against all odds. In some ways it's the same, but it's different, too. They're different. 

"And Liam's just showed up so they're off being, you know, Zayn and Liam," he finishes, as though it's years ago and that's a shorthand his mother will still undoubtedly understand. 

She hums, and then says, "Are you being careful?" 

Harry starts to explain that even though they're farming they're not really _farming,_ and that the most physical danger he's ever in is when he forgets to reapply suncream, but she interrupts him gently. 

"Darling," she says. "I mean - I don't know how to say this, but, is he being good to you?" 

_"Mum -"_

"Harry," she says, "I know, but. I see you get all caught up in things and they don't always work out, and I remember... It was awfully hard on you, when he left the band." 

Harry doesn't like to remember what a mess he was, then. How much he'd wanted to pull the ripcord, use Zayn's departure as an excuse to cancel the rest of the tour, to end it all right there. How he'd bawled to his mother on the phone like a kid, and she'd told him to just come home, and it'd been the one thing he couldn't let himself do. 

"I'm looking after myself," Harry says. "We're just trying to patch it up, like. I don't have great expectations." 

"Well, alright," his mum says, like she's humoring him. "You said Liam's there with you?" 

"Yeah, Zayn's showing him round just now." 

"That's good. I suppose he'll look after you," she says. 

Harry doesn't quite have the heart to tell her that Liam's tendencies to look after others seem to have waned in the past few years, that if anybody needs to be taken care of, out of the three of them, it's probably Daddy Direction. 

"Yeah," he says, instead. "Talk soon, alright? I love you." 

"I love you too, sweetheart," she says, and rings off. 

By the time Harry's hung up and hunted around for a spare charger to plug his phone in, he can hear Zayn and Liam out in the back garden. He pushes both hands through his hair and steels himself before opening the back door and heading out to meet them. 

Zayn's got Liam looking around in the tractor now, a flashlight in one hand, the hood propped in the other. His heavy eyebrows are drawn together as he looks at where Zayn is pointing, where some PVC tubing is hanging limply over a big hunk of metal that Harry's sure does something to make the tractor _go._

"Let me change," Liam says, thoughtfully. "And then maybe I can do something with it." 

They spend all afternoon around the tractor, in a non-vital sort of way: Zayn wanders off to pick some tomatoes they can have with dinner; Harry takes a couple of phone calls, vague about his whereabouts, pushing off plans to book a studio or a writer's retreat or any of the things people keep asking him about; Liam tinkers around with the tractor, one AirPod in, listening to a podcast he keeps trying to explain to Harry with limited success. 

It's a beautiful late-summer day, meant to be frittered away on little things like this. 

The afternoon has waned into evening and all Liam's managed to do with the tractor is extract two gurgling rotations of its engine and get grease all over everything. Zayn sends him upstairs to wash up while he and Harry make dinner. 

They've been eating tomatoes for weeks - quartered and sprinkled with good, flaky salt; sliced thick on ham sandwiches; in scrambled eggs. Zayn's garden has been prolific in squash and tomatoes, so that Harry's beginning to worry he'll never be able to eat either without quantum leaping back to this place. 

Tonight, it's pasta sauce. The tomatoes are simmering in a pot with grated courgette and beef mince, and there's pasta boiling away on the back burner, and Zayn is beside him drinking from a dark glass of petite sirrah. 

Every room in the farmhouse is painted a different color. Zayn and Gigi did them all together when they bought the place - there's a framed photo in the front room of the two of them, paint-streaked with rollers in their hands, hugging each other and standing in the swirls of a plastic drop cloth. The kitchen walls are a mustard-y goldenrod that makes the room glow in warm, sepia tones. It's a place out of time. 

Zayn, standing at the stove, could be anyone, any-when. His dark hair is so fine it catches the lamplight instead of swallowing it, gives him a strange halo. Harry rests his chin on his hand and watches him, and watches him. 

Over dinner Liam tells them both that he's not pressing for partial custody of his son. He says this in the way you might report the outcome of a local footie match, or a sale on yogurt down the market. 

"You must've seen we're breaking up, it's been all over for months," he says, levering a forkful of pasta up to his mouth. 

Harry gives a noncommittal sort of shrug at the same time Zayn says, "Well, yeah," and both of them reach for their glasses. 

It's just, there are no easy lines of enquiry here. This Liam, with his open face and unbothered heart is so removed from the Liam who'd asked them to cancel one of their very last shows because he was heartsick and missing Sophia in the wake of their breakup. He's closer to what Liam had been like ten years ago, all good-natured ambition and careful detachment. That'd been somebody Harry hadn't known what to do with at all.

If anyone _can_ break through his cheerful compartmentalization, though, it's probably Zayn, so it's good they're all here, having dinner and not talking about it. Liam's started up another line of conversation already, talking collabs with Zayn: who each of them have been in contact with, what producers they might go with next time. 

"You've been very smart about your collaborations," Liam says, taking a swallow of wine. "Right from the start, with Kehlani. I'd love to work with her and now she's out of my league!" 

Zayn laughs. "Bit of luck, that. It was all just, right place, right time. The rest of it's just paying attention, getting the right people on the phone." 

"Maybe for you," Liam jokes. "I've not got the mystique to draw on." 

Eventually they all get wine-sleepy and decide to call it a night. Harry's undressing, listening to the soothing sound of Liam doing press ups across the hall. He gets to some very high number and stops, shuffles about a bit. There is the sound of him flicking off the light, then laying down, and then Harry is truly the only one up. 

The guest bedroom where Harry's been living has one window overlooking the dark barnyard. The walls are painted pale green, the color of the underside of a sage leaf. Harry imagines Zayn painting it, picking out this pine bedframe, this cedar chest, this granny-square quilt with its motif of yellows and oranges. 

In this place, he sometimes feels as though he's stepped entirely into one of Zayn's dreams. As though he's not even a person, just a projection of all of the sharpest things they'd ever said to one another, simplified. A symbol. How easy it is to think of Zayn - of all of them - that way, too. 

He thinks he won't be able to sleep, for all this worry, but the day hangs on him. He's done too much work to fret himself into the long hours after midnight. He falls asleep easily, and when he dreams, he dreams of simple things.

-

Unsettlingly, the farm is starting to feel like a place where Harry _lives,_ something he's tried and failed to achieve in posh flats and small houses and chitinous Californian mansions and his friends' attics and all. He's filling a glass at the tap and taking idle stock of what they'll need next time he and Zayn do the grocery order - they're nearly out of milk, and the frozen pizzas Zayn likes, and the garden has yet to yield any decent strawberries so they might as well buy some so Harry can have a smoothie. He brought a blender because he knew Zayn didn't have one. He'll feel stupid if he doesn't at least _use_ it. 

Harry starts writing the list up on the back of an envelope and he's so engrossed he doesn't look up when the side door opens, scuffling feet and vague, pleased laughter. The sounds of Liam keeping Zayn company. 

This whole endeavor, this idea of Harry's to alleviate his own guilt by mending fences, is brilliant, actually. What could possibly do Zayn more good than a visit from Liam? 

What could possibly realign the strange perimeter of Liam's present life if not Zayn's patient, gentle hand? 

Harry is loathe to keep tabs on anybody. He'd trained himself off Google alerts just after the hiatus started and he's sure it's having a healthy influence on the general amount of mindfulness in his life. But it's hard not to know what's going on with Liam. Liam is... Everywhere. 

Harry found out Liam was with Cheryl - a psychological minefield he dared not think too deeply about - via the cover of a magazine while he was paying for gas in LA. The breakup had come his way through a banner ad on a Buzzfeed quiz Nick had texted him - Which piece of obscure furniture are you? (A milk crate that has been repurposed to hold a vinyl collection.) - and Harry'd thought about texting Liam, offering a... And that had been as far as the thought process had carried him. Of all the architects and fixers of Liam's mistakes, Harry has always kept himself low on the list. 

"Mate, you're not just..." There is the exasperated click of Zayn opening his mouth and finding himself speechless. "Like, you're a dad, now." 

"I gave her the house!" Liam's clipped, efficient accent, all high and defensive. "And I, you know - I've arranged it all with a lawyer, they're both well looked after." 

"Right, but." Harry can picture the way Zayn spreads his hands when he's trying to have a different conversation than the one he's having. It happens a lot to Zayn that way. "I know it's been a minute wiv us but did something change? Y'know, family man Payno? You not want that anymore?" 

It's the discomfiting intimacy with which Zayn references their time spent apart which makes Harry realize he's fully eavesdropping. He keeps accidentally doing that. He'd been occasionally called upon to play peacemaker between Zayn and Louis, but here he feels distinctly like he's third wheeling. Even in the beginning, years ago, Zayn and Liam had fostered an impermeable barrier of gentleness with one another, and Harry's both relieved and a little hurt to see it survive this far untouched. He feels clumsy around them, and loud, and large. He scuttles further back into the kitchen, away from their conversation. 

"I dunno," Liam says finally. "I'm really - don't - I'm really no good at it. She's incredible and I'm just stood there like, paying the nanny to stay later and ordering in pasta." 

"Oh, Liam," Zayn sighs. 

They move through the kitchen and Harry shrinks back, watching them. One of Zayn's skinny arms is wound around Liam's waist, holding him.

"What am I supposed to do?" Liam asks plaintively. "I used to think I knew, and now I just... I don't even know who to ask. Tommo's ghosting me, and all." 

"Ah, babes," Zayn says, turning his head to look at Liam. "It's not about, like, figuring out the one thing you're supposed to be doing that you haven't thought of, right? End of the day, it's about showing up for her." He pauses. "For Louis, too." 

Liam tips himself into Zayn's arms and lets himself be held. 

When they'd all put together, at first, there had been a clearly delineated split between Louis and Zayn, the older brothers, and Harry and Niall, the babies, and reliable middle-child Liam had scrapped for his place at the big kids' table until they'd let him in. They'd grown up too fast, all of them, but Liam had tried to _become_ a grownup, and they'd let him fake it and all pretended it was real. 

The way he's falling apart seems inevitable, all of a sudden. 

"Anyway," Zayn says, cradling the back of Liam's head in his hand. "Can't keep jetting off all over the place if you want things to work out. Don't know if, like... Maybe I'm not the best person to be giving advice on this, but when I stopped. You know, stopped performing, I sat down and figured out my priorities. Made a list, like." 

"God," Liam says, muffled where his face is pressed to Zayn's neck. "What'd you end up with?" 

Zayn blinks, and shifts a little, and Harry can feel the exact moment Zayn spots him, pressed up into a corner in the back of the kitchen. 

Harry puts his hands up, robbery victim style, and starts mouthing an apology, but Zayn turns away from him and back to Liam without upset. 

"Give myself someplace stable to live," he says. "Stop doing things that's expected of me if they don't serve a good purpose." He pauses. "Break up with Pez, let her have a life, all that." 

Liam hums into Zayn's neck, and then they detangle from one another and move further into the house. 

"Harry!" Liam starts calling, and Harry ducks quietly out the back door and runs around the house to come in via the front. 

"What, quit yelling, I was meditating," he says. 

Zayn gives him a significant look, with a lot of eyebrow action. Harry tries and fails to give him one back. 

"Only wondering where you'd gone off to," Liam says, easily pleased, as always. Liam likes to know that if he asks for somebody he'll be answered, he likes to feel important and loved. Harry likes knowing these simple truths about someone he's known so long. 

"Oh, you know," Harry says. "It's a big farm but it's not, like, a _big farm._ Sorry Zayn." 

Zayn shrugs, detaching from the conversation, moving to the window to look out at the fields. There's animals to bring in for the night, still, but they're alright out there for a while longer. 

Harry finds himself watching Zayn more in these moments, when he's making a mental list, or doing mindless chores around the farm. He watches the gentle rhythm of Zayn's fingertips on the windowsill and all their painful history seems to drop away: Harry knows lots of sorts of people; Zayn could just be a farmer Harry knows, who's offered him a place to stay for a few weeks. This place is so isolated they could be meeting for the first time, could be becoming friends and learning to trust each other as entirely new people. 

Harry read somewhere - one of those motivational but poorly researched articles that people are always sending around Twitter - that every seven years all the cells in your body have completely replaced themselves. It's hack science, but he likes the idea: they're literally different people, two entirely new bodies meeting, than they were at X Factor. It feels that different, sometimes. 

Liam clears his throat and Harry turns to find his observation of Zayn hasn't gone unnoticed. Liam's big, dark eyes are watching him closely. Under the beard and the biceps and everything Liam still has a little boy's face, an interesting rosebud mouth, a soft, round nose. He watches Harry with the same uncomfortably penetrating gaze you might get from a stranger's child on the subway. 

Feeling silly and caught out, Harry meets his eyes and they both smile at each other and the moment breaks. 

"What d'you think, Zayner?" Liam says, looking over Harry's shoulder to where Zayn is still standing at the window. "Could take the horses around while we've still got light." 

So they do. Liam, a physical person, has a perfectly manageable time trotting around the paddock on Mandarin, stroking her chestnut neck and clicking his tongue to get her to turn. Zayn, who despite the impression his physical self makes has always seemed like more of a concept than a corporeal being, walks Cool in slow, widening circles. Harry sits up on the slats of the fence watching them in the lingering afternoon light. 

When the animals are safely in they all get stoned on the porch together, which is delightful when it involves Liam. Every time he's stoned could be the first time he's stoned, he laughs and monologues so much. 

"Boys, boys, boys," he says, staring up at the porch light. He's been laying on his back on the dusty floorboards for a quarter hour now - Harry's been watching the minute hand creep along on Liam's wristwatch. 

"What about boys, Liam," Zayn says indulgently. 

"You're my booooooys," Liam says, stretching his arms out and grabbing the both of them, Harry by the arm and Zayn by the ankle. "I'm so happy I'm here." 

"Aw, Payno," Harry says, and he reaches over to ruffle Liam's hair against the grain, so it sticks up all over the place. 

Liam snuffles and rubs the back of his head against the ground, and before long he falls asleep. 

Harry's stoned, he's always too stoned with Zayn, always trying to keep up when he's honestly out of practice. The moment stretches and pulls like taffy, Liam snoring gently on the porch between them. 

"I don't wanna have to carry 'im," Zayn says after a time. "'E's heavy." 

Harry pulls a face, which makes Zayn laugh, which makes Liam wake up long enough that they can convince him to let them put him to bed. 

"I love you both so much," Liam babbles sleepily as Zayn tucks him into bed. "Just the best boys on the planet." 

"I love you too, Liam," Zayn says, stretching his name out like he always used to. He's patient and gentle, the same way he had been with Liam earlier. He fills a glass under the bathroom tap and sets it beside the bed and pats Liam once on the shoulder, a sweet, lingering touch. 

Harry shuts off the light and the two of them step out into the hallway, Zayn gingerly closing the door behind them. 

"It's like having a kid," Harry says fondly. 

"'E's going through it," Zayn says. "You know, like." 

Of all of them, Harry expected Liam to most quickly find his footing without the band. Liam loves to work hard, which puts him at an advantage over most of them, and he loves all the promo shit Harry hates, doesn't mind trying to hash out his process with every mid-level journo who's required to ask him about it. He loves production and songwriting, he's still got a decent range despite the years of smoking cigarettes. He has all the bona fides to be an industry darling, and every time Harry sees him on Instagram, or catches the tail end of an interview on the radio, he just seems... Lost. 

Maybe he's reading too much into too little, maybe he's projecting, but. 

"I know," he says, to Zayn. "I didn't think I was going to have to worry about him this much. I was savin' it all up for Nialler." 

Zayn tilts his head just so, and in the dim light, the long line of his throat gleams. "Oh, Haz," he says. "Liam was always gonna be the one, like... Niall's adaptable. But d'you remember what Liam was like, at the beginning?" 

Of course Harry does. Liam with his serious face and his aversion to being touched. They'd all watched Liam figure out how to have friends, and then how to let himself rely on other people, and how to be loved. It seems so cruel all of a sudden, that they'd broken him down like that and left him. 

"I thought about that a lot when I was leaving," Zayn says, like he's following the same train of thought. "I did used to be really, really close with him. It's like - when parents split up, like, and they each have to tell the kids, _I don't love you any less,_ and just hope they'll believe it and understand." He looks around, then back at Harry. "I dunno."

Maybe it's the weed. Maybe it's Zayn's shining fragility, making Harry go crazy. Maybe it's because all of this seems like a dream, most of the time, something he wouldn't be able to grab and hold onto if he reached for it. 

Harry steps forward and pulls Zayn into his arms. 

He is a small and familiar weight. Harry holds him carefully. Zayn's delicate hands come up to rest at the small of Harry's back, and Harry'd forgotten, hadn't he, what it felt like to be touched by him. How gentle he is, always. He smells woodsier now, but still underneath it slightly sharp, like mints.

There is some unnameable feeling pushing up from the subsoil of Harry's heart, reaching towards the sun, ready to bloom. He rests his cheek against Zayn's shoulder and lets it happen.

He's not sure how long they stay there, holding one another. Zayn's cool palms stroke up and down Harry's back. For a moment they're breathing in unison, the same long inhale and slow exhale, and then Zayn yawns and Harry leans back to look at him. 

He's just Zayn: sleepy and rumpled and easy to hold. Harry missed him, _misses_ him, so much. 

"I'm going to go to bed," he says, instead of all that. 

"Okay," Zayn says around another yawn. He pats Harry gently on the cheek. "Goodnight." 

"Goodnight." Harry watches him go into his room and shut the door behind him, standing in the hallway like an idiot, unable to move for all these tender thoughts. A garden full of them.

-

They have a big bonfire on Liam's last night, mostly because Harry and Zayn have been talking about having one for weeks and have each come to the mutual realization that they shouldn't attempt it without supervision. Together the three of them build a circle out of bricks in the center of one of the unused fields. It looks to Harry like a fairy ring, the way all the land around it is untouched, gone to seed. 

After the work is done for the day Harry and Zayn drag the folding chairs from the porch out to where Liam is erecting a pyramid of kindling and firewood. The sun is breaking over the horizon like the golden yolk of an egg. The days are getting shorter. This may be one of the last proper summer nights, before it gets too cold to stay outdoors long after dark. 

Zayn passes around beers from a little red cooler and he and Liam talk shop. 

"I've had my EP out, you know," Liam is saying, gesturing with the hand that's holding his beer. "I don't know, I just can't... I feel like I'm always promoting something, and the numbers are there, you know, and I'm still spinning my wheels." 

Zayn tilts his head one way and then the other, frowning. "I s'pose but, like, if you want to do the album you've got to throw your weight around. They'll have you doing singles and festivals the rest of your career, mate."

"I _like_ singles -" Liam starts. 

"Then what's the problem?"

Liam opens his mouth and then closes it. "I don't know," he says, finally. "It's not what a pictured, is all." 

"You writing with Tommo at all?" Zayn says. "Thinking about it?" 

Liam cuts his eyes away. "I dunno, man. I tell you he asked me to come to his judges' houses?"

"No way!" 

"Yeah, and I'm like... God, it's stupid, I'm sat here like a teenage girl like, _what does this mean?"_

"Hey," Harry interjects. "Teenage girls pay your bills, Liam." 

"Fair play. You know what I mean, though." 

"Well maybe you should talk to 'im, then," Zayn says. "While you're, you know, shattering dreams and all, get a moment alone and just _talk._ He's not writing much either, I dunno. Maybe you go be Lennon and McCartney again for a little." 

The comparison makes Liam laugh, and makes them both shut up about industry stuff for a minute, for which Harry is grateful. It's not that he doesn't want to know what Liam - what any of the others - is up to, but taking them apart and really looking at each of them makes Harry vaguely queasy. He's always measuring himself against the rest of them, and against the band, and he feels bad no matter if he's doing better or worse. 

Sometimes he thinks Zayn is the only one of them to do this whole solo thing right: no promo, no personal investment. He sends singles out like signal flares into the gathering dark and while everybody is chasing that light he's here, living his life, running his farm. His last single with Timbaland tanked and he's totally unbothered. Harry wants whatever inner peace Zayn's got. 

Eventually they run out of marshmallows and conversation, and Zayn stretches his hands above his head and yawns before telling them he's going to go turn in. 

"Only downside of the farm, waking up rubbish early," he says, his voice sleep-softened and warm. "Don't burn anything down without me." 

"Night, Zayner," Liam says. 

"Goodnight," Harry calls after him. Already his shape is retreating, a slim shadow in a field of slim shadows. Occasionally his path will carry him across the light from one of the windows of the house, and Harry will see the motion of his arms, or the ruffle of his hair. 

The night is cloudy, and from where Harry is sitting, the only lights in the known universe are their fire and the house back behind them. Zayn may as well have disappeared into the ether, reappearing only in snatches, and then limned in the light from the open doorway, and then gone again. 

Harry passes Liam another beer. They're running out of those, too. 

"I've been meaning to ask you," Liam says after a moment. He's rolling the beer can back and forth between his hands. "Or, tell you I guess. I don't know, it just seems like something somebody ought to say." 

Liam's conviction to making sure all the things that _ought_ to be said _do_ get said is going to land him in trouble one day, Harry thinks, if it hasn't already. 

Liam clears his throat. "It's okay for you to let it all go, like... If you're not angry with him anymore. That's okay. I think it's really nice what you're doing here." 

"I don't... What?" 

Between them the fire crackles and sends off sparks. They fall gently on Harry and turn to ash on his bare arms. He rubs at them with his palms waiting for Liam to explain himself. 

Liam looks up at Harry, very directly. His gentle face can be completely arresting when he wants it to be, and it is, now. His big, dark eyes reflect the firelight, and his soft mouth is parted in preparation to speak. Harry feels pinned by his undivided attention. 

"C'mon, Leemo." He tries to laugh. "Don't go all serious on me." 

"I would never," Liam says kindly. 

They both take long, distracting drinks. Harry wonders if he's off the hook, if Liam's decided he doesn't have the words for whatever it is he thinks he ought to say. 

No such luck, as it turns out. 

"I know when everything happened you got sort of painted as, like, the one of us who hates Zayn. In the press and all, at least before him and Louis... And stuff's changed, and maybe you know already and I'm just being obvious like I always am, but you don't have to hang onto any part of that if you don't want to, or if it isn't protecting you anymore, or..." Liam trails off, and Harry stares into the darkness over his shoulder, unable to speak. 

"I just think it's okay for you to love him," Liam says with finality. "If you do. I mean, it seems like you might." 

"I love all of you," Harry says automatically. 

Liam's eyes are warm and dark, and he scrubs the back of his hand over his mouth before answering. "Don't be stupid on purpose," he says. "Take it from me, it won't work forever." 

Over a long silence, the fire begins to die. Harry remembers hiking to Machu Picchu with Liam, years ago. The way they'd both sat in wonderment; how small it'd made them feel. How close to one another they'd been in their insignificance. 

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it all," Harry says, not meeting Liam's eyes. "I feel like I'm carrying him around all the time, no matter where I am, and I don't have any place to set everything down." 

"Oh, Haz," Liam says, and he stands up to collect Harry in his arms. Even when he's a mess, Liam has the uncanny ability to make Harry feel small and looked after, no matter what. Harry lets himself be held, comforted, and then the two of them douse the fire together and make the long walk back to the house in the dark. 

Harry parts company with Liam on the porch. "I forgot my bag out by the fire," he lies, and when Liam starts to follow him out, a reasonable chiding about going off alone in the dark threatening to spill from his mouth, Harry looks at him seriously and says, "I'll only be a minute" and Liam lets him go. 

He does circle back to the fire pit, to stir the ashes and see what he can divine from them. The night is cool and blue and enormous around him. Harry tilts his head all the way back and looks up into the dome of stars, their majesty, the thrilling expanse of nothingness between himself and that bottomless sky. 

He walks further out, past the pasture where the horses run, to the field of scrub grass and creeping kudzu that Zayn is hoping to convert to a small orchard in the spring. Some of the soil has been turned, and it's all parceled off into sections and rows, awaiting attention. It's like Harry, in that way. 

The ground is cold under him when he lays down. From down here, he can see everything clearly: the wheeling geometry of the heavens; the velocity at which the earth turns within it; the truth in what Liam said to him over the campfire. He tries to hold all this certainty in him at once, pinned to the ground under that weight of starlight. He tries to draw conclusions but they're all too enormous, he can't fit them into his head. 

Eventually Harry has to stand up - his back hurts from laying in the dirt, and in his pocket, his phone keeps vibrating with texts. When he looks around he can see Liam's left the porch light on for him, one sphere of orange light in a universe of blues and grays. It makes a chiaroscuro of the house, one face lit, the rest in absolute shadow. Harry moves towards it slowly, savoring the night around him.

-

It's smaller after Liam is gone. 

Sometimes Harry thinks the farm is this expanding and contracting thing, this living cradle that holds him close to Zayn, or far apart, day by day. He can sit across the table from Zayn and feel a canyon of distance, or he can watch him from the other side of the field and nearly feel the heat from his skin. 

This morning they're all elbows in the hen house, gathering eggs into a basket. It's been built up in the husk of an old gardening shed, and the roof slopes close over Harry's head, makes him list into the center of the room where Zayn is. The hens cluck and peck around their feet, bobbing everywhere Harry tries to step, like cats. 

Since Liam left Harry's been wondering if maybe he's right, and then second-guessing himself, because it's _Liam,_ who has the emotional wisdom of a hamster. Second-guessing himself again because the seed of truth is hard and uncomfortable in his palm, and because if _even Liam can see it,_ maybe he should stop trying to bury it. It is something wild and out of control, an invasive weed he'll have to tug up by the roots if he wants to get a good look at it.

There's very little light in the hen house, and what does filter through is dusty and strange. Zayn straightens up with three brown eggs balanced in one brown hand, and when he looks at Harry his face falls half in shadow so that one eye appears black and the other, the one with the freckle in it, looks like a coin of yellow glass. He's gotten so used to Zayn over the past few weeks that he's forgotten how striking he must look, to a stranger. 

He looks like a stranger like this, in the queer half-light. Harry worries his own lip with his teeth. 

If he's in love with Zayn now, and if he loved Zayn before, then has he always been? Or if he hasn't, when did it stop? When did it restart? How has he not noticed? 

Harry wants badly to deal in absolutes. He turns away from Zayn and stoops to gather the eggs from an unoccupied roost. 

"Never know what I'm meant to do with all these eggs," Zayn says behind him. He's cradling the basket in both arms, it's grown so heavy. 

"Eat them," Harry says. He steps back carefully and straightens up in time to see Zayn's nonplussed face, not a stranger anymore, just a man he knows. Just a man he's sharing a therapeutic farm experience with. It's whatever. 

"No shit," Zayn says. "You know what I mean." 

"Could do a quiche," Harry advises. "Omelettes. Learn to make challah, there's eggs in that, and then we could do a like, a French toast thing."

Zayn smiles, quiet and arresting. It wouldn't be so difficult, in the small space, to lean forward over the basket of eggs and kiss him. 

Harry doesn't, instead starts picking through the squabble of hens towards the door, his hands still full of eggs. 

Liam is probably wrong - he is about most things. 

Harry is beginning to elbow open the hen house door, ready to escape into the expansive sunshine, where Zayn isn't quite so _present,_ when there's a yelp behind him. Harry would consider himself neither an instinctual nor a reflexive man, which is why when he spins around to see Zayn in a slow-motion free fall, eggs tumbling out of the basket in his arms, hens scattering from under his feet, he has no choice but to drop the eggs he's holding and reach for him. 

Harry blinks. The floor of the hen house is sticky with raw egg and rough with bits of shell, with scabs of dried chicken poop and old pin feathers, with Zayn beside him starting up an embarrassed little laugh. 

"Fuck," he says articulately. There's hardly room for the two of them side by side on the floor. 

Zayn starts genuinely laughing, and Harry can't help but join him. It's stupid: he keeps picturing Zayn's face as he fell, how it's painterly angles had distorted in a comical mask of surprise. He likes when Zayn makes faces that don't look like he's practiced them. 

"God, your face," he wheezes, and Zayn rolls over just enough to punch Harry weakly in the chest. 

"Shut up, couldn't see where I was walking, could I? You blockin' all the light, chickens everywhere an' all." 

Harry takes a deep, shuddering breath. The air in here smells sweet and old, like nothing else. The way the whole farm smells makes Harry want to breathe in deeper, carry it back with him to Los Angeles, when he goes.

Which should be soon, honestly. 

He turns his head to look at Zayn, a few inches away, splayed out on the old boards of the shed floor. He's got feathers and egg yolk matted in his beautiful hair. 

"Sorry about the French toast," Zayn says, blinking his big eyes at Harry. 

They do get up eventually, when the hens have calmed down and start walking all over them, wondering what's going on. Harry helps Zayn to his feet and they both look around at the mess of the henhouse and decide it can wait til the evening to be cleaned up. 

Instead, Zayn drives the old farm truck into town and picks up a carton of eggs and a case of cheap beer at the general store, and Harry waits on the porch for him, and they spend the afternoon baking a misshapen loaf of challah before battering slices of it with eggs and sugar and cinnamon and setting them to fry. There's work to be done but Harry doesn't want to do it, which is typical. Zayn doesn't seem to want to either, though; over a late-afternoon breakfast of French toast and fruit they're just enjoying the pleasure of one another's company. 

It's later, when they're back on their knees in the hen house scrubbing up all the broken eggs with a bucket of grayish water between them when Harry sees him clearly, really _sees_ him, for the first time. All of the anger he's tried to sublimate over the years, all the ugly superiority he's held over Zayn, every petty thought and wistful memory and wish that it'd all gone differently for them, it's all there where he's avoided looking at it. And pressing up through it, tangled in every part of it, the delicate truth: he loves Zayn, in every complicated way a person can love another person. 

He's well and truly fucked.

-

By the time Niall's tour has closed out and he's making his travel arrangements the seasons have begun to turn. The days are shorter. The trees on Zayn's property are having a contest with one another to see which can be the reddest or the most vibrant or the most golden. Harry's out in the little front garden with a rake gathering fallen oak leaves into a pile a couple of mornings a week, getting them into a wheelbarrow and taking them over to the compost heap. They've had rain, and the dusty, sweet smell of the farm in summertime has waned. It smells damp and wild, like decay, like things ending. 

Harry knows he's running through his lease on time out of the public eye. His publicist has been in touch, and a couple of label reps, and his assistant is trying not to bother him with the way meetings he owes people are starting to really pile up. 

Being alone with Zayn, with all these newly realized difficult truths, is as addictive as it is paralyzing. He finds himself analyzing their conversations, examining his own reactions. He daydreams: _What if I just told him? What if I did something?_

_What if_ Zayn _did something?_

It's like he's been unmoored: every feeling that passes through him takes hold and twists him about. When he's angry with Zayn it's blazes through him; when he's pleased, he's delirious with it. There are no calm days on this uncharted ocean. 

Out in one of the fields there's an old irrigation trench that's flooded over during the last hard rain. In the middle it's clogged with fallen leaves, so that one half is slick and misshapen with mud and the other is mostly dry. Harry is grateful for all the little things he has to attend to here. 

He could get lost in details and forget he was ever a popstar and then... What? He could just be here, he supposes. 

Harry breaks apart the dam of leaves and the water goes whooshing through, carrying them further down the trench where they settle like handprints, or sea stars, plastered against the earth. 

It's the little things. That's probably why Zayn likes it so much here. 

When Niall does arrive - he's rented a sensible SUV, and he parks it in the drive beside the truck Zayn says came with the farm when he bought it - Harry is excited to see him. 

Not that he's not been excited to see the others, of course. No, it's just that he and Niall do still see one another. Niall'd come to his LA show, and then when they'd both been in Dublin last spring Niall had surprised him backstage and brought him a t-shirt from the Masters. This whole summer he's gotten missives from Niall on tour - a photo of female mannequin in a shop wearing wig and a floral blouse that looked a bit like Harry three years ago, accompanied by the text, _miss you lad !_ A text from the middle of the afternoon telling him that a bunch of fans had asked Niall to wear the knockoff version of a pair of Gucci sunglasses Harry'd briefly had. _Looked hideous, mate_ with the crying laughing emoji. 

As he watches Zayn and Niall unloading Niall's bags from the backseat of the car, Harry feels like he can comfortably say that if any old fight should dust up, he can count on Niall to side with him. 

Niall gets him into a big hug as soon as he sees him, of course. It's strange how they'd both been twiggy and little once, and then Harry had grown and Niall hadn't, and now Niall's caught up with him. He is a solid weight in Harry's arms. 

Stranger to see him beside Zayn, though. They both look so different, like as they've grown up their defining features have become emphasized. Zayn is more sharp and delicate than Harry can ever remember him being. Niall is sunnier, ruddier, broader in the shoulder. It's a mind-bending physics to remember that Zayn used to always carry Niall around. 

"Mate," Niall says, pulling Zayn into a hug that lifts him off his feet. "It's been too long. When's the album out, yeah?" 

Zayn smiles and shakes his head. "I'll tell you all the dish later, look at you! How was tour!" 

They go inside chattering to one another, leaving Harry trailing behind, watching them. 

Niall is so non-confrontational most of the time that there are countless little fights Harry can remember having with him, arguments that were left unaddressed until time buried them and they weren't important anymore. But he has this strange other side to him, where if he knows he's not going to get away with ignoring a problem he'll put it front and center. He will acknowledge it so aggressively that it becomes the _problem_ that's uncomfortable, not the boy throwing it out in the open. 

He's asking a lot of questions about Zayn's career, is the thing. 

"D'you think you want to do live shows again?" he asks, as the three of them are touring the barns. 

"I dunno," Zayn says. "The sheep are out right now but this is where they hang out at night." He gestures to an empty pen. 

"Right," Niall says. "I guess you'll know more when the record's out, you can make a decision then." 

"I expect I will," Zayn says vaguely. "Tour, I mean. I meant to get to it with the last one but it never came together, I dunno. I had different priorities at the time." 

"But touring might be a priority now?" 

Zayn shrugs with his entire body, noncommittal. 

"Stuff's changed since then." 

_Can't keep living on your ex-girlfriend's farm avoiding your real life forever,_ Harry thinks, and then scolds himself. He can't lose sight of what's important, and part of the point of this entire _whatever-they're-doing_ is trying to be more generous with Zayn's feelings, of which there are apparently many. The farm doesn't feel like real life, but in many ways neither do the label meetings and tour rehearsals and studio sessions Harry's got waiting for him in LA. In many ways nothing's felt like real life since the last time he lived in his mother's house, singing in his crap band and working in the bakery and wanting things but not having them. 

Maybe life only feels real in retrospect. Maybe it's part of the deal. 

They leave the barns and head out into the fields to where the sheep are gamboling around their pen. It's sunny and blustery out, and they're in high spirits. Niall hops the fence and jogs over to the sheep, starts trying to herd them. They are by and large unimpressed with his antics. 

"Our farm boy," Zayn says to Harry, and they both laugh watching him run around and make a fool of himself. 

That evening Niall takes it upon himself to dust off the charcoal grill on Zayn's back patio and make them all steaks. None of them are really _bad_ in the kitchen - well, Harry thinks ruefully, maybe Louis - but Niall has always had the easiest time of it. He stands at the grill unbothered by the occasional flame that licks up his way when fat drips into the coals. He has a beer in his right hand and a big pair of tongs in his left. Niall can travel anywhere and make it into exactly the place that can best accommodate him. 

"When do I get to hear the album?" he asks Zayn, as they all stand around watching the sunset. "Or have you released it all in singles already?" 

"Ha ha," Zayn says. "D'you want to, though? 'Cos I'll play it for you but I don't want, like - if you're asking to be polite, don't, it's gonna eat up your whole evening." 

"Take up my evening, then," Niall says, spreading his hands. 

Harry finds himself stuck washing the dishes after dinner, Zayn and Niall retreating upstairs where Zayn's album is languishing, unreleased, on his laptop. They must have it turned low - maybe they're listening on headphones. Maybe Niall is listening sprawled out on Zayn's bed while Zayn reads a book, or draws, or smokes a joint. They used to be so good at just spending time around one another. 

Is it weird that Harry's never asked to hear Zayn's new album? That he's never seen the inside of Zayn's room, all these weeks on? It could be him up there offering salient advice, critiquing a lyric or a production choice, being Zayn's companion. 

It couldn't, though, anymore than it could be Niall orchestrating this whole farm visit. None of them fit together quite the same way with one another. Still, Harry can't help but feel like he's falling behind, like he's taking a remedial course in being Zayn's friend and still scraping by with partial credit. What's the point of loving him if he can't force himself within arms reach? All his revelations are useless when he tries to incorporate them into himself. 

He goes to bed before they finish whatever they're doing - maybe the album, still, or maybe they're catching up, or... He doesn't even know. From the other end of the hall he can't hear them talking, and there's no music playing. Maybe they've just fallen asleep together, like they used to. 

Harry doesn't stay up late enough to find out.

-

Autumn draws up around the farm like the fingers of a fist, gray mornings and cold evenings and weakening daylight. Zayn spends less time in the house and more out in the garden, tilling over the used earth and scattering handfuls of rye seeds over the soil. Harry reads a webpage about winter-proofing an outdoor henhouse and spends a day up on the little shed's roof, patching leaks and cleaning pin feathers out of the ventilation slats, Niall on the ground passing up nails and a trigger canister of roof sealant when Harry asks for them. 

The afternoons are still mostly warm, and Zayn makes them all hike out to the edge of the property to prepare his partitioned field for tree-planting come spring. After doing some reading and consulting Sandra, the grandmother next door, he's decided to do a slapdash little trial run, six or eight apple trees out here on the farm's northern edge, where the light is reliable and the soil is rich. They're spreading lime over the soil and turning it, churning it, building it up into heaps they'll seed with winter rye and which Zayn will hate dealing with in the spring. 

Harry inspects a callus on his palm, just under where his fingers connect. When it had started to come in he'd complained that it hurt to grip the shovel, that he was dying, that his manicurist would be horrified if he ever got off this terrible farm and back to Los Angeles. It's fully grown now, tough and sandpapery when he runs his other thumb over it. He's tanned since being here, his forearms dark and freckled and ropier than they'd been before, even working out as much as he had been. 

Almost seven weeks here and he feels changed. The earth has swallowed him and he's battled his way out whole, smelling of alfalfa and dirt and sunshine. 

A dozen yards away Zayn and Niall are doing a piss-poor job of tilling the earth, both leaning on their shovels and chatting. Niall is reapplying suncream, his gardening gloves tucked under his arm as he rubs it into his face and neck, and Zayn is giving him the soft, fond smile he's always got on hand for Niall. 

Harry digs his own shovel in and begins aggressively turning the soil at his feet. He can be the only person who cares about getting this field ready for early planting next spring! Zayn can half-ass things like he always does and Niall can be there for a laugh like he always is and - 

"Haz, come have a break wiv us!" Zayn calls. 

_Oh, thank God._ Harry drops his shovel and heads over, accepting a smear of suncream on the side of his neck from Niall. 

"I had extra," Niall explains. 

"Well, thanks," Harry says. 

From up here they can see the entire rest of the farm. So little of it is actually in use - the barns and the house and Zayn's garden beds are a child's play set in the distance. Cool and Mandarin slope around in their paddock. The goats and the sheep are specks in a far off field, grazing on scrub grass and chasing one another around in the afternoon sunshine. 

It's a completely impractical way to set up a farm, every bit Zayn's working on spread as far apart as possible. It justifies those long walks he likes to take, Harry guesses. 

Or maybe it's aspirational, like these rows of trees might become an orchard that needs a hundred yards in every direction. Like there's a future here and Zayn's planning for it. Harry looks around at the mounds of soil, the dirt streaked on his arms and the side of Niall's face and Zayn's old white t-shirt. 

It's a sloppy job, probably, but Harry's proud of the hard work they've done. 

"Alright," Zayn says, dragging his backpack over and passing around mismatched bottles of water. "We should get back to it while the light's good." 

Halfway through the afternoon Niall goes to press a boot down on the back end of the shovel blade and he fumbles it, goes down funny into the newly turned soil. 

"Y'alright, Nialler?" Harry says, jogging over to him. He's covered in loose dirt and blinking up into the sunshine. 

Of all of them, Niall looks the most changed, a few years out from the band: his hair, obviously, but also the bulk he's put on in his arms and chest, the way clothes don't hang off him anymore. His face has filled out, his eyes look less huge and round. He looks masculine, and like an adult.

But in this moment, gone a bit pale, staring nervously up at Harry as though from a great distance, he could be nineteen again. 

"What's going on?" Zayn asks, after spotting them and running over. It's difficult to move quickly over the freshly turned earth. Zayn falls to his knees beside Niall and offers him a hand. 

"You're going to laugh," Niall says weakly, taking Zayn's hand and sitting up. "Think I've ballsed up my knee." 

It takes the both of them, one on either side of Niall, and a very long time, to get back to the house. Zayn draws a bath when they get there and Niall complains the whole time that baths don't really get you clean, and he's covered in dust anyway, and that it's disgusting. Harry stands on the other side of the bathroom door listening to Niall making a fuss and Zayn fussing over him, everything about it so familiar that when he closes his eyes he feels transported, feels young and stupid and at the center of everything.

When Zayn comes out wiping his wet hands on his jeans, Harry catches a glimpse of Niall's frowning head cresting over a landscape of bubbles before the door shuts. 

"That part never went away, after," Zayn tells him softly. He's leading the way, vaguely, to the kitchen, and putting the kettle on. 

"What part?" 

"Oh, you know. Feeling like I ought to be looking after him. Feeling this bad." 

Harry doesn't know how to say "It's Niall, you can't blame yourself for every bad thing that happens to him" without sounding callous, so he waits for Zayn to continue. 

"I dunno," Zayn says finally. "I like, I thought he was through the worst of it and then there was all that promo where he had that broken foot? Drove myself crazy googling what happened in the middle of the night after I saw." 

"I broke my foot at the same time, you know," Harry says. 

Zayn waves a hand at him. "Not the same." He sets down a cup of tea in front of Harry. 

Harry knows it's not the same. There are fixed points in the way the five of them were together, holdovers that have never gone away. He's seen it this summer: the gentle way Zayn handles Liam; the careful distance Harry and Louis maintain with one another; how they all fall over themselves to look after Niall, even if he's fine, most of the time. He wonders what's lingered between himself and Zayn, if there's anything at all. 

Presently, Zayn realizes he's stranded Niall in the bath and goes to check on him and help him into a set of clean clothes and down the stairs. 

"Louis' going to kill me," Zayn is saying, helping Niall down the last few steps with an arm around his waist. "I can literally hear it now, he's gonna chew me out for putting you to work, like, _he's delicate, think about his knee!"_

Niall laughs, his head thrown back to show off all the freckles on his neck. 

"Let's just not tell him," Harry says. "He'll come out here all ready to throw hands, get booted off X Factor." 

"Again!" 

Eventually Zayn goes off in the truck to pick up a couple of pizzas from the sole good restaurant in town. After the day's dramatics, Harry doesn't feel much like doing anything besides sitting next to Niall on the sofa and asking him if he needs anything every few minutes, which throws a bit of a spanner into his cooking plans. 

While Zayn is gone it begins to rain. 

"Can I ask you something?" Niall says after a time, setting his phone aside. 

Harry nods, gives him his full attention. 

"How long are you planning on staying here?" 

"I hadn't really thought about it," Harry says.

Niall frowns. "You probably should," he says. "Zee's album is what, nine weeks out? Holidays coming up?" 

All that is true, but Harry'd thought... "I didn't plan to stay this long, even," he says. "And then everybody was coming to visit and it got extended, and I thought I'd, like, know when the time was right." 

Niall just looks at him, his owlish face soft. Even at his most stubborn and self-isolating, Harry has trouble not wanting to tell Niall everything. 

"I guess I thought I'd come out here, feed some chickens, have a couple of good talks with him and then it'd be patched up," he says. "And then I'd go home, and it would stay... You know. Fixed." 

"Harryyyy," Niall says, drawing his name out like he's trying not to laugh at him. Harry knows it sounds stupid. He knows it _is_ stupid, to have expected to get away so easily. 

Outside the storm is getting worse, and Harry's relieved when he hears Zayn's truck pull up, the headlamps flooding the front room with light through the window. There is the sound of Zayn cursing and stamping up the steps and then he's there, the door flung wide, his hair plastered to his face, looking deeply annoyed. 

"The things I do for you," he grouses, and heads off towards the kitchen to get plates. 

Harry looks back at Niall but the moment is past, Zayn kvetching in the kitchen, things to be attended to. Harry makes a mental note to book his flight back to Los Angeles. To make a decision. 

To patch everything up, for real, and damn the rest of it. There's only so much he can carry.

-

Niall spends most of the weekend with his leg propped up in the front room playing one of Zayn's guitars. It's consistently blustery out, now. When Zayn comes in from the fields he brings a chill with him, and he smells of autumn when he passes Harry in the hallway, both of them trying not to feel worried or guilty. 

Niall's on FaceTime with Louis when Harry comes in, and he peers at the phone over Niall's shoulder and is delighted to see Freddie's impish toddler face taking up most of the frame. 

"Hiiiii," Freddie says, waving at him. 

"Thought you were still in England," Harry says, directing it at the sliver of Louis' shoulder he can see behind Freddie. 

"Every time I get two days off in a row I come home," Louis says, and Harry is hit by an emotional mack truck. Louis has always been _dedicated,_ yeah, but he's also always been ambitious. He spreads himself too thin, sometimes. He's getting himself back to his son for maybe sixteen consecutive hours, losing sleep to do it, because of course he is. Because he's Louis. 

Harry looks at the side of Niall's face and can tell they're thinking the same thing: how much they've all grown up, how much they've all stayed the same. It's a scale Harry always feels like he needs to balance, shucking off old habits or scrambling to pick them back up, whatever he can do to tip the ballast one way or the other. 

Freddie is showing Niall a toy car, driving it over Louis' leg and making _vroom vroom_ noises. Freddie knows Niall's name, recognizes him. The scales tip and settle and Harry tries to make sense of them. 

"Saw your judges' houses," Harry says. He'd looked up some clips on an Instagram update account out of morbid curiosity. He really never sees himself going back to X Factor, no matter how grateful he is. He and Zayn are of a mind, on that, at least. "Nice to see mum and dad have made up." 

"Leave it," Louis says, but not harshly. "Can I tell you, it was actually really good to see him. I think I needed his insight, like." 

"You did good, mate," Harry says. "I'm pulling for you, yeah? It's about time one of us actually won." 

Louis laughs, and Harry waves to Freddie, certain the kid has no idea who he is, and goes for a little walk around the garden. 

Liam and Louis being back on an even keel seems to portend better times ahead. They were such a matched set, especially at the end - Harry's felt off-kilter just knowing they haven't been getting on so well. 

He takes himself around the vegetable patches and past the sunflower house, which has gone brittle and brown as autumn has fallen. He's not looking for Zayn, exactly, but he thinks it might be nice to run into him, to tell him about Louis and Liam making up, to laugh at their old married squabbles. He lets himself into the barn and Zayn's not there. He makes a loop around the old willow tree and looks out into the fields and can't see him anywhere. His truck's still in the drive, but he can disappear when he likes to. Harry stands in the driveway, feeling stupid for missing him, and missing him all the same. 

When he goes back inside Niall's off his call and is messing about on Twitter, posting what looks like an old picture of the telly in his house in LA. When Harry asks what he's doing he snorts.

"I'm not like you, Styles, I've thought ahead," he says. "Everybody gets so up in arms if more than a couple of us are off-grid at once." 

"So you're lying?" Harry teases. "That photo is a lie." 

Niall rolls his eyes. "Don't take the piss, it's for your sake, too." 

Harry doesn't push him any further, just settles in next to him on the couch and puts his head on his shoulder. 

"You're always thinking ahead," he says. 

Niall pats him absently on the side of the face with his free hand. 

"Somebody's got to," he says.

What Harry doesn't say is that sometimes Niall's penchant for living four months ahead in his calendar might be preventing him from having a nice time being a healthy, wealthy, beloved twenty-five-year-old popstar. It doesn't seem to bother Niall, after all. 

"Are you still seeing that girl?" he asks instead. "Hailee?" 

"Thought you weren't getting google alerts on us anymore," Niall says. 

"'M not. Louis mentioned, when he was here." 

"Oh," Niall says. "No, it didn't work out." 

Harry's been on the observational side of a lot of Niall's relationships that _didn't work out._ He doesn't want to be unkind, he doesn't want to suggest that Niall doesn't _try,_ only sometimes he worries. Like if Niall never stops thinking so much about his career, or his knees, or his devoted fans inconveniencing other people he'll never let anybody near enough to love him. Niall had seen the rest of them mess up often enough and badly enough that Harry guessed he might've been put off the whole idea of serious relationships entirely.

"Well, that's okay," Harry says instead, cuddling Niall a little. "She seemed nice, though." 

"She's nice. We're still friends." 

Niall is always _still friends._ Harry wants to shake him sometimes, to say forcefully into his face, _it's alright to be hurt by things._ But then, he'd be one to talk. 

"Do you ever see yourself settling down?" he asks, and Niall shrugs, jostling Harry's head a little bit. 

"Bit early to be thinking about that, Haz." 

"Well, but Louis and Liam have kids already. I don't know, seems like we're coming up on settling down age, right?" 

Niall shrugs again, and this time Harry finds it harder to resettle his head on his shoulder, which, fair play. He's prying, something he's always made a habit not to do with Niall. It's how he gained Niall's loyalty in the first place. 

"I'm just busy," he says. "Got the next album to think about, and I've got this sinus surgery coming up, like, and Louis's always needing me for advice or to babysit or whatever, when I'm around." 

"Louis can pay a babysitter," Harry points out. 

"I don't mind," Niall says. He turns his face a little further away from Harry. 

"No, really, don't let him walk all over you," Harry says. He knows what it's like being Louis' _person,_ after all. It's easy to get addicted to the attention. It's as easy to lose yourself in it. 

"He doesn't," Niall says sharply. "Christ, Haz, you don't get it." 

Harry blinks. It's not like Niall to ever be brusque with him, even when he deserves it. They have a long unspoken agreement with one another to be endlessly patient, because nobody else will be. 

"What don't I get?" Harry asks. 

There is a moment - Harry wouldn't notice it if he hadn't known Niall very well, for a very long time - where his face changes. Harry searches his mental rolodex of Niall's expressions and comes up with one he knows well: panic. 

"Niall," he says. He tries to remember Zayn's instructions on how not to spook a horse. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to." 

"It's not -" 

And the front door swings open, Zayn letting in a billow of cold air behind himself, rubbing his hands together. 

"You done on the phone?" he asks Niall. "What'd I miss? How's Tommo?" 

Harry widens his eyes at Niall and tightens his mouth. _We're not done yet!_

Niall shakes his head minutely, his face completely blank, before turning his attention to Zayn. His face clears instantly. Harry glowers at him. 

"He's good! Asked about your horses, I think they really won him over when he was up here."

Zayn smiles and comes around the couch to settle on Niall's other side. Niall doesn't shrug _Zayn_ off when Zayn leans on him, Harry can't help but notice.

"And the knee?" he asks. 

"Oh, y'know." Niall flexes his foot. "Busted. The usual. I'll have my insurance bill you." 

"Sounds good." Zayn ruffles Niall's hair the wrong way, like he's a kid. Zayn always knows how to be soft with other people, non-Harry type people. 

"Louis had Liam out at judges' houses, did you see?" Harry asks, ignoring the moment. 

"Did he? That's nice, like. Hate to see them two fight." 

It's scrapes Harry up, sometimes, when Zayn talks like that, like it's nothing that they've all been out here to see him. Harry'd been the one to put it all together, to forsake meetings and phone calls for weeks while he lugged around sacks of chicken feed and wheelbarrows of topsoil and did manual labor for the good of the bloody band none of them were in anymore. He'd been instrumental in the growing up they'd all done with one another this summer. Zayn's been wandering around talking to sheep and worrying after his raspberry bushes. 

"We'll see how long it lasts," Harry says sourly. He's put himself in a terrible mood thinking about Niall keeping things from him, about Zayn taking him for granted. He feels the awful impulse to pick a fight burning at the back of his throat. 

"Don't say that," Niall says. "They're working at it, putting in the effort. Might even write together again." 

"Great," Harry says, and he makes himself laugh. "Ha ha. The whole band's practically back together." He laughs again because it's funny. Isn't it funny? 

Zayn and Niall are staring at him. Zayn has drawn back, isn't touching Niall anymore. He's as far as he can get from Harry without standing up and he looks a little like Harry's just slapped him, which is awfully ungenerous. 

"What?" Harry says. "It's a joke." 

"It's not very funny, Harry," Niall says finally. "It's mean-spirited." 

"Isn't that the point, though?" Now that he's started Harry can't make himself stop. "That we're all such great friends again? It's been eighteen months, Nialler, isn't this what you _want?"_

"Shut up, Harry," Zayn says, his face starting to color as he gets worked up. 

It's exactly what Harry's been waiting for. Spending all summer tiptoeing around Zayn's fragile fucking feelings while he tries to sort himself out. Carrying all this shit on his own when it's Zayn's fault, isn't it? How gratifying it is to finally wear him down, to be able to prove that it all meant something after all. 

"Or what?" Harry laughs. "You'll quit?" 

"God, Harry, you've been wanting to lord it over me, I can tell, like," Zayn says. "I left, you didn't. I'm weak, you're strong. Christ, you can be such a child." 

"It's not always about you," Harry says. 

"Oh, no, I forgot. It's always about _you."_

Between them Niall has shrunk further and further down in his seat. He can't gracefully leave the room and escape this conversation on his bad knee, so he's gamely pretending it's not happening. 

"Sure, Zayn, tell me - when we both wanted to leave, and I stayed, I kept my word, and you didn't, that was real fucking _childish_ of me, wasn't it?" 

"Fuck off," Zayn says. "Get better material, the rest of us are over it." 

"Oh, the rest of you?" Harry says. He can't stop himself. "The rest of the band? Talk about it, don't you lot, how _over it_ you are, probably ready to get back together since no one's going to buy your fucking album." 

Niall is looking straight ahead with the thousand yard stare of a war veteran. On his other side, Zayn's entire body is tensed like he's ready to run, or to jump at Harry, like he can't decide which. 

"You can't just take yourself out of it," Harry says. "Can't ride the band's coattails forever, pretend like you're above the business shit." It's all coming out of him like bile, all the hurt, jealous, horrible things he's thought about Zayn in the last three years. He can't tell which he thinks are true anymore, only knows which ones he wants to say to hurt Zayn, to put enough distance between them that he can feel _normal_ again. "Call Louis and Liam up, you can tour as a three piece since none of you are doing anything that matters. Me and Nialler have better things to do, right?" 

"I'm not coming back to the fucking band," Zayn says. His voice has gone shrill and hurt and furious. "You're not getting back together and you all know it. Don't make me the bad guy for saying it." 

He storms out of the room and up the stairs and then Harry can hear the distant slam of his bedroom door. 

Harry turns to Niall, ready to be empathized with. 

"Harry, I think you should probably go, too," Niall says. He looks pale and exhausted all of a sudden. He's seen Zayn and Harry row before, though - maybe he's in more pain than he's been letting on? 

"At least let me help you up," Harry says. He reaches for Niall's shoulder and doesn't understand why Niall leans away. 

"Really, mate," Niall says slowly. "Please. I don't want to argue. Please just leave." 

It's then that Harry begins to suspect he might've messed up.

-

Harry loiters outside the door to Zayn's room. 

He's going to have to come out eventually. Even if _Zayn_ is willing to skip dinner and isolate himself, the horses need to be brought in for the night. Still, Harry's been waiting there for nearly an hour, listening for any signs of life on the other side of the door. He wonders if maybe Zayn'd gone out the window, or if he has some sort of secret escape route that Harry wouldn't know about, because he's never been inside Zayn's bedroom. 

He's never even tried, really. 

He's nearly given up hope when the door swings slowly open, Zayn framed in the rectangle of lamplight from inside. 

The bedroom is painted a striking venetian pink.

It's small and simply furnished: a bedstead that looks like it might've come with the house, and a tartan quilt rumpled across the mattress; a bedside table with a lamp and a mismatched stack of books; a desk by the window. On the far wall there's a framed picture of Zayn and Gigi together, from ages ago, judging by Zayn's hair. Their noses are bumping and they're both smiling in a way that doesn't look practiced, doesn't look paid for. Harry wonders if Zayn misses her, or if he thinks they're going to get back together, or what. Everything in the room looks like it's used often. Everything is clean. Zayn sees Harry peering around him and catches his gaze. 

"Harry," Zayn says. He doesn't follow it up with anything. Mostly he just sounds tired. 

"Can we talk?"

Zayn pinches the bridge of his nose. "Yeah. Yeah," he says. "You've got to keep up, though, I'm doing... Y'know. It's important." 

Harry follows him out to the horses' pasture. Mandarin is wandering around in the middle, Cool is watching the distant road over the fence. Harry'd googled some horse behaviors when he'd first arrived and he still doesn't know if Zayn's horses are... It's stupid to wonder if the horses are friends with each other, isn't it? He wonders if this is the life they thought they'd have. If they're capable of enough critical thought to have expectations, disappointments. Those seem so universal sometimes, but maybe they're universally human. 

"I just don't know why you'd say that," Harry says. 

Zayn doesn't look at him. He's busy leading Mandarin back to the gate by her bridle, stroking her nose, soothing her. Harry wants to be soothed by Zayn's hands, by the gentle noises he makes. 

"When you said the band was never getting back together," Harry adds helpfully. "Like, ever." 

The joke falls flat. 

Zayn looks over his shoulder at him, leading Mandarin towards the stables, awash in the fleeting glow of dusk. Harry is following behind as best he can, leading Cool, who's calmer by half and easier to handle. The surreality of the moment nudges up against Harry just once - the two of them, former teen idols turned erstwhile farmers, leading their horses. Zayn is always bringing the horses out and putting them away again. Bitterly, Harry wonders if Zayn likes being in control of another animal's freedom, as a reparation for how little control he's had over his own. 

It strikes him as awfully ungrateful, honestly. What would Zayn have done if things hadn't been decided for him? When they'd met, Zayn hadn't had any time management skills at all. He probably still wouldn't, if not for the obligation of his stupid fucking farm, and the lingering influence of the competent ex-girlfriend he'd never deserved in the first place. 

Of course Harry'd been angry when Zayn left the band, but they hadn't had time back then, and he'd folded it all up as tightly as it could go and crammed it somewhere out of sight and now it was inflating like a life raft, pressing up against him from the inside, into his ribs and lungs and stomach. He was angry with Zayn. He may love Zayn, may be _in love_ with Zayn, but all he has room for right now is the poisonous feeling threatening to come spilling out of him again. 

"Fucking answer me," he says, stopping where he is, a dozen yards from the barns. 

Cool bends his dozy neck to pluck up some grass, which is very anticlimactic. 

Zayn doesn't turn around, finishes bringing Mandarin inside and getting her settled before coming back out. 

"I'll be right back," he tells Harry, taking Cool's bridle and leading him away. 

Harry badly wants a cigarette. He wants to get drunk, do something reckless. He wants to punch Zayn in the jaw. He wants to sleep next to him and be sweet to him and make him promise to stay this time. 

When Zayn comes back out, scrubbing a hand over his mouth, he doesn't look like he wants to do anything with Harry. These conversations they have, this time they spend together, there may be no pleasure in it for him. It makes Harry feel flayed open and embarrassed, how much he wants from Zayn. 

Nobody else has ever made him feel so incidental. 

"You hurt Niall's feelings," Harry says. "You know he was the hardest sell on the hiatus." 

Zayn pierces him with his big dark eyes. "I'll apologize to him myself if that's true," he says evenly. "But I think we all know he's doing fine without the band." 

"Yeah, well," Harry starts. "You've got no right to say anything about the band, anyway. You aren't in it anymore." 

Zayn spreads his hands. "I wish you'd just say what you want to say," he says. 

The barns, a mismatched palette of reds and browns, have all gone shades of purple in the dying light. Zayn is lit from one side, his soft mouth and high cheekbones dramatic, his expression hard to read. He is so beautiful and so impossible, Harry could almost forget that underneath it all he's just a person. He was just a teenager with a beautiful voice and no dancing skills who liked comic books. Who wanted to buy his family a nice house. 

Who, most of the time, wants to be left alone. 

"What do I want to say?" Harry asks. 

Zayn takes a shuffling step that doesn't really move them any closer to one another. What if he apologizes? What if he asks _Harry_ to apologize? What if he kisses him, will they still have to have this awful fight, the sharp edge of which is digging into Harry's palms right now? 

"You don't want any of the rest of them to say they don't miss the band because it makes you feel out of control," Zayn says plainly. "You want to be the only one whose decision matters." 

"I don't even _want_ to do the band again, Zayn. I was ready to leave the same time you were, you know that." 

"I don't think you want to do the band again," Zayn says. "But you like knowing you own it, don't you?" He does take a step towards Harry then. "When I left, you could finish out a tour, you could still be One Direction," he says. "We could've done, if Louis had left instead of me, or Liam, or Niall." 

The sun has set and Harry's too cold, suddenly, his jacket abandoned over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. He rubs his arms and carefully doesn't look at Zayn. 

"But if you'd left instead of me, that'd be the ball game," Zayn says. "And I know you stuck it out, and good on you that you did, but don't pretend you don't know how things would've broken if we switched places. Don't pretend you don't like knowing it." 

"Fuck you," Harry says. "Don't act like you know me. You don't. You haven't for a long time." 

"Maybe not," Zayn says. "But I don't think I'm wrong about this."

The house is dark when they get back. Niall's bedroom door is shut. Harry and Zayn part ways without saying goodnight, and Harry lies awake feeling like a nerve stripped raw, watching the slow movement of the moon in the clear night sky outside. He checks his phone at 2:17AM, and then again at 2:49, and then he stands up, packs all his clothes into his suitcase, and sets off into the night. 

His rental car is just where he'd left it, halfway down the drive, and there's a flight to Los Angeles out of Pittsburgh in five hours time. Harry drives with the radio off and the windows down, breathing in the blue night as it hurtles away behind him.

-

Los Angeles has the curious way of making Harry forget that he's ever existed anywhere else. The whole of the late summer and early autumn might as well have been a daydream he'd had, stuck in traffic, trying to get up the coast. Word spreads he's back in town and just like that, his planner fills up, his assistant looks after his phone, his pool gets cleaned and waits for him to come home after meetings, chlorinated and glorious. 

Harry swims laps in the morning and takes lunch appointments and spends a lot of evenings at what can only be described as _garden parties_ at Jeff's, lounging into the wisteria and string lights, a sweating cocktail glass in his left hand. 

There _is_ one undeniable piece of evidence that the farm happened to him, though: he's having lunch with Louis. There's a bistro midway between the studio where Harry's been fucking around lately and the posh daycare where Freddie receives educational enrichment - Harry'd read the pamphlet - and they've met up a couple of times now, a concept both so ordinary and nonsensical that Harry has trouble looking at it head on. 

Strange that they might be allowed to just be friends who catch up sometimes, now. 

"Nialler's healing up alright?" Harry asks. He's ordered a merciless pastrami sandwich and he's contemplating the strategic advantages of his next bite. All the lettuce and shit is dead set on spilling out the other side. 

"Yeah," Louis says. "Been staying at mine, actually - me and Freddie looking after him, like." 

"Softie," Harry says. He goes for it and ends up with a dribble of mustard down the side of his hand but otherwise unscathed. 

As if blowing his knee out at Zayn's wasn't bad enough, Niall had finally gotten a sinus surgery he'd been putting off for ages. He keeps lightly complaining to Harry about it over text, the sort of minimal but friendly contact that Harry knows means Niall is trying to tell him he doesn't blame him for what happened at Zayn's. It's the sort of tactful, kind thing Niall's always doing. 

But he hadn't said anything about staying with Louis. Harry'd assumed he'd be resting up at home - Niall hates being looked after. 

"So you two..." Harry says. He leaves the tail end of the question out there like a fishing lure. 

Louis stares down at his own sandwich and doesn't say anything at first. 

"Thought we might, like, give a proper go of it," he says finally. "Or I mean, we talked about it. We're trying it out." 

"Oh." Harry isn't sure what to say. A part of his own self-preservation has been tangled up with Louis' investment in his own straightness for so long - not that it matters _now,_ but it's strange to see Louis' sharp, grownup face go pink and embarrassed when he admits it. Harry's happy for him, a complicated happy. 

After lunch Harry follows Louis back to his house and surprises Niall. Seeing them together is both strange and not: the tender way Louis brings Niall his post-surgical dose of antibiotics is familiar. It could be Louis four years ago looking after Niall's first surgical scars, or babying him through a bad cold. But Louis leaning down to kiss Niall's forehead and then the ruddy, still-swollen side of his nose is different. Seeing Niall be comfortably domestic with _anyone_ is different. 

It makes him miss Zayn all at once, the feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome in him. It makes him miss the complicated baggage of loving someone with whom you share a long and storied history. 

Niall's still on strong painkillers, and he falls asleep on the couch after a half hour of directionless conversation. 

"Can I ask you something?" Harry says to Louis. Beside him on the loveseat Louis is watching Niall sleep, his angular face soft and attentive. 

"Course," he says. 

"Does it still scare you? Even though you're, you know, even though you've decided to try?" 

Louis doesn't take his eyes off Niall's sleeping face. "Yeah," he says. "All the time." 

Niall's arms are tucked up close to his chest, curled up and sleeping with his mouth open, a silvery thread of spit connecting his lip to the sofa cushion. 

"All the time," Louis says again, more softly. "But it's like..." He turns towards Harry and gestures helplessly. "What else am I meant to do?" 

After a time, Harry says goodbye and gets in his car and drives away, meaning to go home. He's got a thousand things to do, and he intends to think very hard about doing some of them before falling asleep before sunset and waking up blearily early tomorrow. 

Instead he misses his exit and sends his car hurtling down the freeway, the ocean spilling across everything to the west of him. It's broad, and its broadness reminds him of the farm and the bigness of the sky out there. How he'd lain out in one of the pastures alone and stared up into that vast expanse and felt himself tumbling into it, no branches or buildings or airplanes to come between him and the bottomless well of heaven. How they were, all of them, pinned to the same earth by something so insubstantial as gravity. 

Harry pulls over as far up the coast as he can get before sunset and parks on the shoulder. It's gorgeous, every color a gentle watercolor wash seeping up towards the gathering dusk. He props himself up against the hood of his car and takes an inadequate, overexposed picture on his phone: you can hardly tell what anything is, the reflection of the lowering sun on the ocean is so bright, the colors so washed out. 

Sometimes Harry feels drowned dry for _missing_ things: the unselfconscious optimism he'd had as a teenager; the belief in other people's genuine good intentions; how he'd wanted to keep his friends close to him, even if it meant putting in more of the work, for a while. He wouldn't have thought twice about sending a shitty phone camera picture of a sunset to somebody he loved ten years ago. He would've believed it was sweet and genuine and that his thoughts and feelings would be made visible through his actions. 

He would've trusted in that. 

All of a sudden, Harry is close to tears. It's stupid to be so successful and so terminally lonely. Sometimes he thinks he might die from it, that he could drop dead in his front room and be found by his assistant two days later because he'd not answered a critical email. He knows it's ungrateful, but the more he is beloved, the more alone he feels. 

He pulls his phone back out and sends the picture to Zayn without a caption.

-

Harry hears it secondhand, of course. 

Zayn has left the farm and is in Los Angeles on business. 

Louis, who's in London for the last long stretch of X Factor live shows, is the first one to tell him. Apparently Zayn'd been round to see Niall. He'd apologized for how poorly his visit had ended, and they'd played a couple of songs together in Niall's home studio for a laugh, and - 

"I guess they've made up," Louis says gustily over the phone. "So I'm stuck with him, too. You can still save yourself, mate." 

It makes sense, the timing - Zayn's album launch is only a few weeks out and he's done next to no promo, he must be getting raked over the coals by his label. Or maybe he's negotiated out of it, maybe he's better at that sort of thing than Harry is. 

He doesn't want to speculate. He doesn't want to _care,_ but some things can't be helped. 

"I wouldn't worry," Harry tells Louis. "It's not like him to be, you know, a significant presence." 

Louis laughs and it makes Harry feel a little better about it all, the feeling that he's done something terribly wrong. He's been taking extra-hot showers and avoiding mirrors and trying not to be alone for too long at once. Symptoms of the guilty. 

Every time he replays Zayn's words in his head he feels scraped out and put back together empty. It makes him nauseous to think Zayn thinks he knows all of Harry's worst impulses - more so to think Zayn had been getting to know him again, anyway. 

What a disappointment he must've been. 

Harry's coming out of a cycling class when he sees that Zayn and Gigi's breakup has gone public. It's a blip of a headline on a woman's gossip magazine, but Harry's been tuned to notice Zayn's name - any of their names, really. He knows they broke up weeks ago, but it's hard not to worry, anyway. 

Is Zayn in LA because Gigi'd gotten the farm in the breakup? It doesn't seem like something she'd do, just kick him out, but... Harry won't pretend to know the ins and outs of their relationship. He hopes it's not as cut and dry as that. He hopes Zayn's hired somebody to look after the electric bill and all his appointments and everything, since he's not terribly good at doing those things himself. 

Harry wants to call him, and stifles the impulse, and scrolls through his phone stonily following people on Instagram just for something to do. 

The days pass as they have been: Harry takes calls. He reaches out to keyboardists he knows, thinking he ought to hold auditions in the next few weeks. Mitch and Sarah are in town and he books a table at Nobu to take them out and hear about their vacation after tour. He holds his breath in every conversation he has, thinking somebody will say something about Zayn, and nobody ever does. 

He holds his breath in his house alone, thinking Zayn will show up and they can both apologize, but he never does. 

"I hear Zayn and his girlfriend have broken up," Gemma finally says one morning over FaceTime. It's evening for her, and all the lamps are on in her flat, painting her golden. 

Harry's been for a run and come home to throw all his windows open, letting the slim winter sunlight come pouring through. 

"They have, yeah," he tells her. "He's actually here in Los Angeles, I'm told." 

He hasn't told her specifically what happened, why he was so unexpectedly reachable again, being photographed out and about again. She's asked him outright every time they've spoken, so Harry's braced for it when she does now. 

"D'you think he's come to apologize? For whatever second world war you've fallen out over this time?" She's building up a full head of steam over it. "I can't believe he'd kick you out after all the work you've been putting in, god, what a prick, I mean - "

"Look, can you just - " Harry starts, meaning to gently dissuade her. 

"I can't just, actually," Gemma says. "It's my whole job to stick my nose in where it doesn't belong. And I'm, like, genuinely sort of worried about you." 

Harry's not sure why that does it, but it uncorks something in him, sets the whole story spilling out like wine over a tablecloth. He starts it in the middle, and has to double back to explain the beginning, and by the time he's got to everything that happened the night he left the farm, it's like he's hearing it for the first time, himself. 

"That's an awful thing to say to him," Gemma says. "Why would you say that to him? That's really cruel."

Harry wants to turn the video part off of their call but he's afraid of what it'll say about him, that he can't even face her like this. 

"This may come as a surprise to you," he says, tries to make a joke of it. "But I might have some unresolved issues vis-a-vis the band." 

"You?" Gemma says. "Nooo, never." 

"D'you know," he says. "I just... I wanted to leave too, and he knew, and we agreed to... I don't know. It sounds stupid when I say it." 

"It sounds stupid when you don't say it." 

"He just left me there," Harry says. "He knew, didn't even ask me to go with him."

"Harry," Gemma says, in her most big sisterly voice. "What do they say. You have to put on your own oxygen mask before you assist anyone else." 

Harry looks at her sharp, pixellated face, which is both like his and not. It makes him wish he lived in London, sometimes, the way she never takes him seriously.

"I think maybe you should call him," she says, "and apologize, while the getting's good." 

"Yeah, maybe," Harry agrees. A few minutes later they ring off and he heads out to a lunch thing with some friends of Jeff's and tries not to worry about it.

Zayn's been in Los Angeles for nine days when Harry finally swallows his pride and calls him. 

He's waited until all the conditions are perfect: he's had a light but filling meal, he has no obligations for the rest of the night, the windows are open and the night is warm and smells of the ocean. Harry opens a bottle of wine and has half a glass to calm his nerves. 

Harry's ready to be the bigger person for once. He's ready to apologize. He's ready to tell Zayn how he feels about him, even if it goes nowhere, even if all it does is cement the fact that they're never going to be friends the way they used to be. 

He finds Zayn in his contacts, down the bottom, right above Zedd, whose real name he never remembers, and dials him. 

_We're sorry. The number you have dialed is disconnected, or is no longer in service. Please -_

-

Harry's wandering around Book Soup looking for something thoughtful he can send to Gemma for her birthday, only he really should've picked something out weeks ago and he's let it get down to the wire and it's making it impossible to concentrate. Every book he picks up is the exact perfect one, until he reads the back and realizes it's garbage, that his sister is smart and better than this, and the whole process starts all over again. 

He's turning a first edition of _House of Leaves_ over in his hands, feeling the weight of it in its protective sleeve. There's a salesperson, a manager or archivist or somebody, at his elbow, waiting for him to make a decision. 

It's a beautiful book. Harry had picked it up and read it on the American leg of One Direction's last tour, letting it wash over him with all its complicated footnotes and hemiolic prose. He'd bought it because he remembered Zayn reading it once, the same way he'd listened religiously to _Dark Side of the Moon_ because it was something he and Zayn had shared, once. Harry was always sublimating his feelings into these pointless rituals. 

"I'll take it," Harry tells the salesman, and searches his jeans pockets for his credit card. He shouldn't keep it in there loose, but a wallet ruins the line of his pants, and he keeps getting papped lately after so many weeks off grid, so he's thinking about that sort of thing. 

He pays and asks for gift wrap and then has to pay again, an awkward dance with his hand half in his pocket, ready to dig his card back out. He's thinking about texting his assistant and having her pick up something else, as well, something practical, like a sweater. But a nice one, you know? Something Gemma wouldn't buy for herself. 

Beside him there's the gentle clearing of a throat, and Harry pointedly doesn't look, wants the last moment to compose himself before the whole shop starts asking him for pictures. 

When he does look around, there's nobody there. 

The salesperson comes back with his book, wrapped crisply in argyle patterned paper, which Gemma will tease him for. Harry takes a last look around before leaving, setting off on Sunset going south. 

The whole walk back to the car park he has the queerest feeling, like he's being watched, like there's some phantom just behind him, like a second shadow. He feels like that a lot in LA, though, and he's usually right. Some hanger-on, somebody whose calls he hasn't returned or who has a project they want to attach his name to. Sometimes it's a fan who wants to ask him about Louis. It all makes him want to go to sleep for a hundred years and try again when nobody knows him anymore. 

Harry's leaning against the driver's side door of his car, shooting Jeff a text before he gets behind the wheel, when, like a summoned ghost, Zayn appears at the top of the stairs opposite him. 

It's just the two of them, alone in the empty car park. 

"Were you following me?" Harry says, his voice roomy and strange under all this concrete. 

"From the bookstore, yeah," Zayn says, like it's a normal thing to have done. "I didn't want to make a scene there." 

Harry puts his phone in his pocket. "Are you making a scene now?" 

"I'd rather not, if I'm honest." 

Quiet falls. Harry can hear the cars outside on Sunset, a street preacher hollering about the end of the world. In a far off part of the parking garage, somebody locks their car with a remote fob, and Harry hears the muffled honk. If he holds still enough, he can almost hear Zayn breathing, fifteen feet away. 

"I didn't follow you _to_ the bookstore," Zayn says after a moment. "That was genuinely a coincidence, like." 

"Oh," Harry says. "Well, that's good." 

Zayn takes a couple of steps towards him, his light footsteps echoing off all the concrete. "Can we talk?" he asks. Harry is turned inside out from relief and nerves warring in him. 

"Yeah," he says. "Let's go for a drive." 

In the end Harry ends up just bringing Zayn back to his house, with its comforting passcode-protected gate, and offering him a neat glass of Scotch out on the back patio. The days have concertinaed down into their absolute narrowest, in deference to the upcoming solstice. Even Los Angeles is cool in the early dusk. They drag two deck chairs close together and watch the night draw up around them.

Harry has an apology poised on his lips. He watches Zayn's face in the indirect light from the house: the long slope of his nose; his heavy brows and eyelashes; the stray hairs around the edges of his beard where he's failed to keep neat. Zayn is wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and they make him look smaller, younger. They magnify his already large eyes slightly, make him seem impossibly vulnerable from the right angle. 

There are some things worth conceding for. Harry knows this, and looking at Zayn here - sitting on Harry's back patio like it's nothing, like it's not the most profound thing either of them have ever done for one another - he knows he's drawing up on a worthy concession. That sometimes things are worth losing face, worth letting go. It had been a great comfort for a very long time to be angry at Zayn. It had preserved him, once. He wants to put it down here, and walk away tall without it weighing him down.

Harry is opening his mouth to speak, to tell Zayn all this, just as Zayn says, "I'm sorry for saying all those things." 

"What?" Harry asks. 

Zayn turns his beautiful, symmetrical head to look at Harry. It's a habit the two of them have always shared, wanting to look someone in the eyes when saying something important, or difficult. 

"It's okay to fight sometimes," Zayn says slowly. "You have to, sometimes. You have, you know, arguments. But you shouldn't ever take advantage of somebody's insecurities like that." He clears his throat. "I mean, I shouldn't have. Of yours." 

Leave it to Zayn to call it what it is. All Harry's organs might as well be out and bloody on the patio between them. 

"Knowing those things about somebody, it's like..." Zayn takes a long sip of Scotch. Chlorine wafts over the cool night air. "It's a gift, like. Here are all the ways you can hurt me, please be careful." He pinches the bridge of his nose and looks back up at Harry. "And I wasn't careful. I was mean, so. I'm sorry." 

"I was going to say I'm sorry," Harry says after a moment. 

"And you're not, now?" 

Someone on the block is having an outdoor soiree, and the heavy scent of citronella candles cloaks them when the wind shifts. 

"No, I am," Harry says. "I just didn't want you to think, like, I'm only saying it because you said it." Harry coughs into his fist. "I said such awful things to you," he says finally. "I don't even know why you even got in my car today, I was such a shit." He looks at Zayn, an impossible task. "I'm sorry." 

It's late in the season for the Santa Anas to be blowing, but a hot, dry wind sweeps its fingertips over them nonetheless. It pushes Zayn's hair over his face, makes a mess of Harry's where he's kept it growing out. Somebody at next door's party uncorks a bottle of champagne and the _pop_ goes echoing around amidst _oohs_ and _aahs._ It's a beautiful evening. They've apologized to one another and, for once, they've both meant it. 

"Do you think we should talk about the other part?" Harry says, despite himself. 

It's just that if he doesn't say it now, he never will. If he doesn't tell Zayn he loves him, it will rot on the vine. It will turn poisonous. 

"The other part," Zayn says, like he agrees. 

A little armada of late-falling autumn leaves scatters over the lawn, blown in on a breeze. Harry sort of wishes they had a joint, right now. Something that would mute the way his heart jumps in his chest, the way it always seems like it's trying to break out of him and get to Zayn when they talk like this. 

He thinks of a half-dozen years ago, when they'd loved one another in a way that'd felt safe to say out loud. When falling asleep beside Zayn and marking himself permanently in a link to Zayn and kissing Zayn hadn't seemed silly or crazy or complicated. A long time ago Harry hadn't felt like this when he'd fallen in love: scarcely able to cope with how tender and nervous it made him. To think that he loved Zayn. To hope that, in some measure, Zayn may love him back. 

"It's so hard to get over you," he says ruefully. "I don't know why, I just... If I could go back and do it again I still don't know what I'd do, if I'd want to leave with you or ask you to stay. I don't know what the right thing is, to have done." He sculls the rest of the drink. "I feel like I picked wrong but I don't know what I could change." 

"It's already happened, Harry," Zayn says. He reaches over to put his fingertips against Harry's wrist for a moment. "We're always getting things wrong," he says, gently. "Eventually we have to let them go." 

"I don't know if I ever learned how," Harry says, and is surprised by the truth of it. His whole life, he's buried every important hurt until it rotted away, or sprouted into something else.

"What do you want, Harry?" Zayn asks, not unkindly. He's resting his chin in his palm, looking at Harry with those huge, golden eyes. 

_To kiss you,_ Harry thinks immediately, and then it gets subsumed by more complicated things. _To feel like I used to, like you were the only person on earth I could stand next to without feeling like you were siphoning the life out of me._ It's a memory too jagged and cracked to look at head-on. _For you to listen to me without having to interpret me. For us to speak to one another in the same language._

"I want to know if you love me, too," he says instead. 

It's like when Zayn left he'd left a long splinter in Harry's palm, worked so far under the skin that it couldn't be seen, could only be known by the ache. It's like every time Harry's tried to slice it out of himself he's gone shy around the sharpness of the blade, has left it in because the pain you know is easier, sometimes. Now, when he speaks, it's like he's pressed on either side of the splinter and worked it up and out, the wound made fresh again and the pain different, hard to bear, but he knows now. It's healing. 

"Harry," Zayn says, and reaches over to take Harry's hand in both of his own. "Come here." 

When Zayn kisses him, he tastes like mints and cigarettes. Harry can't help himself, he has to climb up onto the deck chair beside him, has to hold him carefully. He puts his hands on Zayn's waist with the gentleness he'd use to cup a match flame in a strong wind: any closer and he might get burned. 

If he only ever has this... If the work they put in with one another can only go so far, can only give them one perfect kiss before rending them apart again, Harry supposes he'll survive. But god, if every kiss could feel like this. 

"Zayn," he says, breathlessly. 

"Of course I do," Zayn says. He tucks his face into Harry's neck and stays there. "Harry, of course I do." 

Without them noticing, it's gotten late. The garden is lit by the underwater lights of the pool, and the strings of lights hung around the neighbors' yard, and the glowing yellow heart of Los Angeles sprawled out on every side of them. 

"Listen," Zayn says, tucking Harry's hair behind his ear. "I'm going back to Pennsylvania tomorrow," he says, even though Harry doesn't want to hear it. 

"Let me come with you," Harry says. He feels petulant, and at sea at the idea of Zayn gone when they've only just begun. 

"I think you should stay here," Zayn says. He wraps an arm around Harry's waist to soften the blow. "And I think we should talk on the phone, and I think we should try to be smart about this, even if it's hard."

Harry puts his head on Zayn's chest and listens to the brag of his heart, steady and slow. The rhythm of his breath pressing against Harry's cheek. Like a boat and the ocean, they rise and fall together. 

"Okay," he says, finally. It's smarter, it is. 

"I miss you," he says. "I love you," he says, just to listen to the way Zayn's heart picks up.

-

Gigi and Zayn have been over for long enough that she just... Lets them have the farm for the long New Year's Day weekend, provided Zayn hauls himself out in the mornings and evenings to look after the animals. Harry's been dreading this like he does everything complicated: the five of them together again, in the same place at the same time for the first time since Tokyo. 

It had been Zayn's idea, actually - he'd begrudgingly allowed Niall to add him to a WhatsApp group between the five of them, which none of them used, really, except to congratulate Louis on his X Factor win, and then for Zayn to say, casually, _Want to come to the farm for New Years?_

A message so unexpected Louis had texted back _wrong chat mate_ and they'd all gotten confused over the course of an afternoon. Niall eventually checked his phone and sorted everyone out and they'd all set up flight details and trusted one another to be discreet. 

Harry gets a red-eye from London where he's been having Christmas with his mum, and when he turns up, bleary, on the doorstep with the sunrise still a couple of hours off, Zayn shows him to a guest room and wordlessly goes back to bed. Harry can't even muster the strength to want to puzzle Zayn out. 

They've been speaking, but he and Zayn haven't seen one another since LA, and haven't really talked about it. The kissing. The everything. 

Instead he calls Zayn and listens to him talk about his day, and tells him stories about LA people they both know, and what he's having for dinner, and what movies he's watched recently. They talk and talk and talk. They relearn one another in their new, grownup lives. 

Harry burrows into the guest bed and pulls the quilt all the way up over his head. It smells like Zayn, in that it smells like this house, this farm. It smells old and homey like Zayn never did when they were all growing up together, new clothes all the time, musty buses and clinically clean hotel rooms and nothing in between. 

He wakes up a couple of hours later dying of thirst. 

There's half a pot of coffee still warm on the kitchen table. Zayn's nowhere to be found. The house is drafty and chilly in the grey morning light. There's half a box of protein bars in one of the cupboards and Harry eats one and drinks the rest of the coffee and waits for something to happen. 

Maybe he's meant to go find Zayn. 

The farm is full of picturesque and sentimental places they could talk, after all. Harry imagines leaning over the fence at the pasture where Zayn usually has the horses, and telling him he loves him, and kissing him. He imagines scattering grain and grit out for the hens, and his hand brushing Zayn's, and turning towards him, and kissing him. Finding Zayn watering the rye grass in the raised garden plots out back, and grabbing him by the elbow, and kissing him. 

Harry puts his face in his hands. 

Eventually he does take a mug of tea out to the back garden, his breath steaming the air. Zayn is a dim shape across one field, ambling along in an enormous green parka and a beanie. Harry's trying to decide whether or not he can pull off running across the field to catch him, half-full mug of tea and lack of a jacket notwithstanding, when his phone goes off in the back of his pocket to tell him they're not alone anymore. 

Liam turns up first, newly clean-shaven and boyish. He has a hard sided suitcase that looks convincingly travel-worn. On the plane ride over Harry'd acquainted himself with Liam's itinerary for the year and been exhausted just reading it: a tour is one strategically planned thing, but the festival hopping promotional train Liam's been on since his first single released makes Harry dizzy. He finds himself looking at Liam's handsome profile for signs of burnout but he seems, honestly, to be doing fine. 

He's a mess but he's made his peace with it, Harry supposes. 

"I'm gonna get a power nap in," Liam tells Harry around a yawn, and wanders off to do just that. 

Louis and Niall are flying out together - Niall's texted ahead to let Harry know, _Lou's insufferable right now - please laugh when he brags about being first of us t win X Factor or he'll mope to new years ._

Niall made his and Louis' travel arrangements, so they have a rental car reserved at the airport and a map printed out as well as the GPS on Louis' phone. They park next to Zayn's truck and Louis insists on carrying both the suitcases and Harry watches them from the front room's window feeling jealous and soft-hearted. Before they get to the front steps, Louis says "Niall" - or what looks like it; Harry can't hear them - and Niall turns around and steps into his space and kisses him. 

It's a movie kiss, almost: Louis' gentle hands on Niall's waist, the way they fold in against one another. Niall's palms cradling the column of Louis's throat. It's a kiss you'd see in a jewelry ad at Christmas, a kiss that says, "you've never been kissed like _this,_ unless you've purchased _this"_ with a close-up shot of a princess-cut engagement ring after. It's a kiss that means even though Harry can see them, is looking at them right now, they're alone in the world with just one another. 

Maybe it's scary for them, being here together. _Together._ Maybe they're both feeling like they're standing on the precipice of something, like they're venturing out onto a narrowing branch together waiting to see if it will snap, or if it will hold their weight. 

Maybe Harry's projecting. 

He steps away from the window and goes to bother Liam until he feels like a normal human being again. 

By the time everyone has slept off the worst of the jet lag and eaten something of substance it's late, already time to break into the wine and champagne and whatever else can be found in Zayn's pantry. Harry unearths a dusty bottle of authentic-looking bourbon and pours them all a glass, wincing when it burns his throat, uncut. 

They catch up with one another, and the evening slips by around them. Somebody thinks to put New Year's Rockin' Eve on the television, but muted, just so they all know the time. 

And then it's seven minutes to midnight. If Harry lets 2018 die without sorting this out he's going to lose his mind. He grabs Zayn gently by the elbow and tugs him into the kitchen. 

"Look at me," he says, "You've made such a fucking mess of me. I think you should apologize again." 

Zayn _does_ look at him, and for a moment Harry's sure he's gone and run his mouth again and ruined the trust they've built up, when he's just trying to be _honest,_ the way Zayn and his therapist and everyone are always telling him he ought to be. 

But after a long moment Zayn smiles at him, soft and unguarded, and he steps forward to wrap Harry in a hug. 

"We're not going to get it all right, right away," Zayn says into his shoulder. "Take it one step at a time, alright?" 

"Alright," Harry says. He feels petulant. He wants the drama of a fight followed by a kiss followed by something else. 

"We're on the same side," Zayn says. 

"I know." Even though it hadn't felt like it for the longest time. "I know." 

"So don't be a dick about it when we're not, like... It's not The Notebook." 

Harry laughs. "I know," he says again. 

In the living room, Liam and Louis are having some kind of shouting contest counting down to the new year. 

"We should go back out there," Zayn says, grabbing Harry loosely by the elbow. 

Harry allows himself to be led. In the living room Niall is opening a bottle of champagne with a tea towel over the cork to prevent it from injuring anyone. Louis is standing beside him with a gentle hand on his waist; with his other arm he has Liam in a headlock. 

Zayn is laughing.

The clock strikes midnight. It's the perfect way to start the year. 

-

When Harry comes downstairs the next morning Zayn is in a pair of trackies and a big hoodie making an enormous pan of oatmeal. 

"That's sweet of you," Harry says, dipping a finger into the oatmeal and yanking it back when it's hotter than he expected. "But I don't expect the lads'll be up for a while." 

"Hands off," Zayn says. He swats Harry back and begins slicing a banana into the oatmeal. "It's not for you, it's for the hens. It's new year's." 

Harry melts like a sugar cube held under a kitchen tap. 

_"Zayn,"_ he implores. "They're _hens. I_ am here and _I also_ enjoy oatmeal with bananas in." 

"There's oatmeal." Zayn points to an open canister of oats. "And bananas. Help yourself." 

Instead Harry dogs Zayn out to the henhouse and watches him scrape the steaming oatmeal from the saucepan into a little trough. The girls come scrambling out and cluster around pecking and clucking. 

"Zayn," Harry says. 

Zayn is just watching the hens eat, gentle and satisfied. It's the exact same look Louis had worn watching Niall sleep after his surgery: protective and fond. _This is important,_ that look said. _This is home._

Zayn turns his huge, lovely eyes to Harry, but his expression doesn't change. It's been over a year, now, since Harry first turned up on Zayn's front step ready to fight him, ready to ruin things for good. It's been a long time coming. 

Harry steps forward and puts his hands gently on Zayn's waist, over his big, unflattering coat. 

It's not that he's sure, is the thing. He knows he _isn't_ sure, can see a thousand different ways this ends up in flames. If he thinks about it too long he starts to convince himself out of even trying, so he tries not to think about it. He tries to do the things Zayn said this farm is good at making him do: feeling and acting. 

He kisses Zayn. 

All around the world is still and cold, and the long-fingered dawn draws up around them slowly, and the year begins anew. Zayn has a birthday coming up, when they'll both be in New York for work, and Harry's been thinking about having him over and making him dinner and making out with him like teenagers on a first date, like people who are still learning one another's details. He kisses Zayn, and kisses him, and kisses him. 

When they break apart they keep their arms around one another, each huffing a little cloud of steam into the chilly morning. 

_I love you,_ Harry thinks, because he does. _I'm always going to have loved you._

It's like Zayn can see it on his face, because he starts to laugh, and then he's leaning up and kissing Harry, and laughing. It isn't hot at all - just the opposite, really, but it's perfect. The hens cluck and fling lukewarm oatmeal around just beside them. The untended fields roll out on every side. The little farmhouse stays warm, and Niall, Louis, and Liam are all still asleep inside. 

It's a new year, and if new years are meant for resolutions, Harry thinks he's found one worth keeping. 

_Fin._

**Author's Note:**

> [say hey/reblog on tumbo](https://warpedtourniall.tumblr.com/post/185742725356/animal-husbandry-by-heartofthesunrise-zarry-31k)
> 
> nouis companion fic forthcoming so u could subscribe to this series if ur into that???


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